Making Search Really Work

01/26/2006 - Think back to your last local search experience. You populated that blank search box with what you thought were a few carefully chosen critical keywords and hit return expecting a plethora of specific answers to your search. Did you get back results that were not relevant to your search, or worse yet, did you get no results at all? Local search can be just as frustrating for advertisers. It's hard for an optical shop owner to understand why his store shows up when a user searches "eyeglasses", but not "spectacles".

We've heard a lot of discussions in the marketing community about improvements in local search, but despite all the advances, studies have shown that only about half of all online searches are viewed as successful by the user. More alarmingly for local search operators is what happens if the search is deemed unsuccessful by the user. 27.2% of users in one survey immediately switched to another site/search engine when their search returned an unsatisfactory set of results, and only 7.5% refined the search with more key words (Click here for more). Bottom line, users want relevant results and if they don't get them, they are not afraid to go elsewhere to find them.

Hence, to satisfy and keep users, and maximize exposure for advertisers, having a local search site serve up a complete set of relevant results for every search is beyond important, it's essential. Because usage of online Yellow Pages (IYP's) is still growing, it's critical to the long term success of publishers that their results be better than those found when searching one of the major search engines. This need was echoed by Jean-Pascal Lion, Vice President of E-Directories at Yellow Pages Group, when we asked his view:

"We have been well trained by Google to enter whatever you want in to the search box and hope for a good answer. We know we needed to do something to drastically improve the search result ......