Yellow Pages fights Google with mobile search, gives iPhone app update

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Friday, 16 May 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! With Google reporting higher mobile usage than ever, especially through the iPhone, pre-Google information services are striking back with their own mobile search apps. In Australia, the local version of the “Yellow Pages” is reporting surging levels of people accessing the service through mobile phones, across all carriers, in line with growing search demand - while Sensis also gives us an update on progress with its iPhone search application. In Australia, the company behind the Yellow Pages (or the “Yellow directory”) is called Sensis, and is owned by Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, Telstra. For years, Sensis and Yellow have been the primary way for consumers to access the most comprehensive collection of information about businesses, as has been the case with Yellow Pages directories around the world. A little company called Google, now a very large company, has changed things dramatically in recent times, giving enormous competition to the world’s Yellow Pages publications, but even though Google is now the 800 pound gorilla in the search space, Yellow Pages publications haven’t disappeared, and have themselves evolved to cater for the online world. Australia’s Sensis organisation boasts its own search engine, the White and Yellow Pages in printed and online form, and has branched out into digital mapping, online and printed classifieds through a publication called the “Trading Post”, amongst other initiatives designed to broaden its appeal to the public and its own income stream. Although many complain that the White and Yellow Pages in their online form is still a long way from the usefulness of Google, Sensis recently made the claim that they had been hard at work in improving the service, something we wrote about on the 15th of March this year, and while many of the comments suggested otherwise, it was interesting to see that at least one commenter was a regular user of Sensis services and had noticed a dramatic improvement. Now Sensis has issued a press release noting that there has been strong growth and surging numbers of people using mobile phones to search for products and services. Sensis reports that “use of the mobile version of the Yellow directory increased by 20 per cent last month continuing a year of strong growth.” Sensis also announced “upgrades to its online and mobile services to enable business listings to be sent by SMS from web to mobile as well as mobile-to-mobile for free”. As Sensis is owned by Telstra, its services are tightly integrated into Telstra mobile phones, but with Telstra the largest telecommunications company in Australia, this still translates into millions of users. But Sensis’ Yellow figures aren’t limited to Telstra phone owners – the Yellow mobile application works on most modern mobile phones from any Australian network, not just Telstra’s, and any mobile device with a browser is able to access Yellow’s mobile enabled website. Sensis have released the details of the top 10 mobile search terms through the Yellow mobile website and mobile application, the details of which are on page two. So, what does all this mean, according to Sensis? And what was Sensis’ answer when we asked them about the progress of their previously announced iPhone search application under development? Please read on. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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