Dug this up from a five-year-old draft:
Sensis are nuts. They’ve totally shot themselves in the foot, and they’ve only got a limited amount of time to plug the gap before their Yellow Pages foot falls off completely.
Yellow Pages on the web doesn’t contain entries for all of the businesses listed in the physical Yellow Pages. Sensis charges businesses extra to list on the web. Not many have taken Sensis up on that option, meaning that YPW has remarkably few businesses listed – and because YPW has few businesses, consumers don’t turn to YPW to find businesses. And because of that, fewer and fewer businesses are listing… and so the death spiral goes.
If anyone there had one ounce of sense (sic), they’d be giving web listing away for free, or even negative price. For a while, while the network effect was being established. Then the charges would start hiking up, and the profits rolling in. But no, they had to try to be profitable before the monopoly was established. Bang! bang! Wow, my foot hurts.
I don’t think I was wrong. When’s the last time you used the yellow pages online to find… anything?
About two years ago I think – first time and last time, as I recall being absolutely baffled by the results it gave back to me. to White Pages instead and instantly got what I wanted.
Hmm I thought that plain yellow pages listings were free. It’s only when you wanted something even remotely fancier that they charge extra. Is that not the same online?
In any case, yeah the yellowpages.com.au is useless. It’s probably the worst ever attempt a print product online, to the extent that it’s probably easier to find something in the print version. To make matters worse, they haven’t picked up a single clue on how to do online search batter in the last 10-15 years, like maybe even look at what Google are doing? But as an example if I search for ‘chinese takeaway’ in my suburb I only get two results, neither in my suburb. Though if change it to ‘restaurants’ there are two within walking distance of home. Though it does seem they’ll show under ‘restuarants – chinese cuisine’. A search engine could certainly do a lot better.
The data from the yellow pages is now posted in google search results. http://www.techworld.com.au/article/265841/sensis_yellow_finds_home_google_maps
When viewing the information page about a business on google maps, it notes that the business listing was provided by the yellow pages.