Friday, May 4th, 2007
Yellow Bot: Local Search
Category: Showcase
Yellow Bot is a local search solution that cries Web 2.0.
You have map mashups everywhere, including on the search results.
The project makes a heavy use of Ajax technologies. View source to see YUI, jQuery, thickbox, and much much more.
4.5 rating from 50 votes
The problem with this and all other Yellow Page sites out there is that they are powered by yellow page data. Businesses have to pay to be in the index. So if you search for pizza places and Mario’s down the street is the best pizza in town but they didn’t pay to be in the index, then you will never find Mario’s.
This is why I think Google and Yahoo local have much more relevant listings. They index everything they can get their hands on. Not just paid advertise content.
To duder’s point, this app fails to find the largest public swimming pool in NYC if you query “swimming” in “NYC” …
Duder, we don’t let anyone pay to get in the index (or get a favorable position in our search results). You must have us confused with one of the “bad yellowpages”. ;-)
JoeBoy - yeah, we are missing places like this still. Currently we’re only processing locations with a phone number. We are working on getting that changed, of course. :-) If the swimming pool does have a phone number (if there’s an office basically) then you can add it on our “submit a business” link and it will get into our index…
Thanks for trying out our site! It’s brand new, so there are still some “rough edges”, but we are typing fixes and changes to our code (Perl, Javascript and CSS) as quickly as we can. :-)
- Ask (CTO YellowBot)
Hi Ask,
I went to the search page and saw the map link. I clicked on it and saw the cool spotlight effect. How did you do that? I don’t think anyone else does that and would like to put it on my mashup site.
cooooooool
Wow! Very cool spotlight effect! It looks the best in IE though.
flubber: it looks like canvas is being used for the Safari effect but I don’t know what is going on in IE. Ask?
In addition the yellowpage type listings they reviews from CitySearch. For a company I work with they have CitySearch reviews that have been removed from CitySearch’s own website due to violation of their terms.
I wonder if they have some relationship with CitySearch or just using an old crawl. If they are not working with CitySearch, seems like a huge copyright issue.
Fantastic Idea. 2 years back a friend of mine wanted to do this , but of course without Ajax that time. This site is welll implemented - but one question from me :
How will it earn money once it is out of alpha and beta ? Any ideas ?
Duder said that “Businesses have to pay to be in the index”. But this site seems to let you add your business for free.
Because I am looking for innovative ways to earn money with my new free intranet e-learning platform for colleges too.
Using a wiki is another approach to this kind of website that may appeal to a different sect of users. If you’re one of them, I’ve created Wikipages for that purpose. It’s very much a grassroots site, and hopes to emulate the Craig’s List “barely-commercial” approach to web site/community development.
mike & flubber,
I don’t remember exactly how we did the spotlight thing actually. It might be using an effect from YUI (just adding a layer on top of everything else).
Of course I’m pretty sure getting the details right, as always with this stuff, involved a lot of swearing and “head banging against wall” from one of my colleagues.
:-)
- ask
local search is pretty cool i use a local site and magazine http://www.wyndhampages.com.au/ very useful and good looking too lol