Last year, BellSouth and SBC Communications, now part of AT&T, partnered to purchase Yellowpages.com and join their respective telephone directory services in order to further this online service. On December 1st, BellSouth Corp. and AT&T Inc. officially revealed their enhanced online directory in the form of Yellowpages.com LLC, putting themselves in direct competition with Google and Yahoo!, along with Verizon’s SuperPages.com.
Yellowpages.com was originally owned by a company in Henderson, Nevada. BellSouth and SBC acquired the properties to create the joint venture which combined Yellowpages.com with BellSouth’s RealPages.com and SBC’s SMARTPages.com. The revamped Yellowpages.com site has been running since November 20th, but was officially launched on December 1st.
CEO of Yellowpages.com Charles Stubbs said this in a statement: “This is a significant milestone for us – and the industry – as we remain dedicated to providing the most logical source for advertisers and consumers who are increasingly searching the Internet for local information.”
Yellowpages.com boasts that their new and improved site has more powerful search capacity that allows consumers to search by keyword, business name or type, and filter their results by expanding or narrowing their searches. Consumer guides for services such as finances, automobiles, and information for weather, movie time listings, and traffic conditions have also been added to lure consumers to the site.
Major Internet firms are trying to find ways to move beyond traditional Web search by offering local search. This allows them to assist Web users in finding information on local businesses like shops and restaurants in their vicinities. Since phone companies have long been the key providers of local business information, it logically follows that they would help spearhead the local search movement.
David Goddard, an analyst at publishing research firm Simba Information, said “I think you’re going to see a neck-and-neck battle between Yellowpages.com and the search engines, but the search engines are going to be trying to catch up.” He said that Yellowpages.com may have a leg up on their competition since they already have up-to-date databases with local information. Combined with a long-standing foothold in local markets, it appears that Yellowpages.com may be putting some unexpected pressure on their powerhouse competitors.
Though Yellowpages.com is expected to compete directly with Google and Yahoo!, Goddard expects that the two sides will eventually have to work together, saying “One way or another, what you have here is one company that has the traffic, the other that has the database. Different agreements are going to happen over the years.”
Sources:
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx
?type=internetNews&storyID=2005-12-01T052333Z_01_FOR119391_RTRUKOC_0_US
-TELECOM-YELLOWPAGES.xml
http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/DN-yellowpages_01bus.ART.State.Edition2.13c5455e.html
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