Comments on: A9/Amazon Launch Visual Yellow Pages http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2005/07/18/A9Amazon-Launch-Visual-Yellow-Pages/ LOCAL MEDIA WATCH. The Nexus of All Things Local Mon, 01 Jun 2015 22:23:47 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.39 By: Dane Madsen http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2005/07/18/A9Amazon-Launch-Visual-Yellow-Pages/comment-page-1/#comment-32 Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000 #comment-32 A9 YellowPages image bank is neither new nor scaleable. France Telecom did this several years ago and found the costs of developing a complete image set – without consideration to maintainence – was onerous. This differs slightly in that A9 has a picture of the business where FT had a picture of the building at that address – far more managebale given the churn of businesses.

Additionally, if a directory does not have critical mass of a feature, the feature will not be considered core. This is similar to the effort to have print ads online – the fact that fewer than 5% of the businesses have print ads – makes this a feature, not core data. Amazon will find this out the hard – and very expensive – way.

]]> By: Kevin Pestinger http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2005/07/18/A9Amazon-Launch-Visual-Yellow-Pages/comment-page-1/#comment-33 Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000 #comment-33 The A9 Yellow Pages beta site is most interesting for the way it quickly engages consumers and merchants by making it so easy for them to improve the information available for each business (such as checking off the best picture of the storefront, notifying A9 of a busines closure, clicking on a five star rating system or providing details on hours of operation, etc.). This type of data collection is one of the most difficult and important things that local search sites need to do.

The Yahoo! Local site (which I view as one of the best local search sites available from both a functionality and content perspective) has struggled so far in their effort to get consumers to provide ratings and other information and I believe this is because they do not provide enough benefit to their users for doing so. Amazon has a strong history of being one of the leaders in consumer ratings, list creation, collaborative filtering, etc. and it will be interesting to see whether consumers find it worth their effort to more actively participate in improving the A9 local search site.

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