A9 Introduces Visual Yellow Pages

Intro
Of course the day after I published my article about Local Search at the big engines, back on January 26th, I heard about A9’s new undertaking in this area. But I figured I’d give things a few weeks to settle down before getting a Search Lounge review out. Although Amazon’s A9 is not one of the ‘big engines’, since they are not doing full-scale web indexing, they are still a formidable player whom I am sure will only get bigger and better as they continue to develop their search products.

A9’s local search, called Yellow Pages, is different from the local services offered by Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo. The listings data comes from Axiom, but the differentiating factor is that they have collected photographs of businesses. To do this they simply strapped cameras on top of cars and drove around taking photos. Currently, A9 has pictures for ten US cities, but plans to expand that as evidenced by this job posting for Block View Drivers. For more information, here is an article called A9.com brings Yellow Pages to life by adding 20 million images.

I think there should be a field of query analysis that combs search results on Google and Yahoo looking for the word cool and seeing what results come back for different queries that include the word. I did this with cool search engine for Kartoo and got great results, so let’s try it again. On Yahoo the fourth listing for cool yellow pages is A9. And on Google, the search cool yellow pages shows 3 out of the first 10 listings being about A9, although A9 itself does not appear.

Right now, for San Francisco, there are still many businesses that are missing photographs. But A9 provides the ability for users to submit photos. This is particularly useful if you’re the owner of a photograph-less business.

Also, because A9 covered entire blocks at a time with a series of photos, I have noticed that sometimes the default photo for a business is actually a couple doors away from the best photo of the business. Let me explain: when you get to a business with photos, there will be a row of photos, not just one photo. Each photo is like an animation cel that reproduces the effect of walking along the street, except you see them all next to each other instead of melded together like a cartoon. So there might be two or three photos that have at least some part of the targeted business in them. This can be a good thing because it shows different angles and provides visual context of the street. In any case, to correct this situation is very easy, simply click on which photo is the best image. Both times I did it, that image became the default image.

Oh, and the whole thing is free, unlike other solutions like Google’s Keyhole.

Relevancy Tests
The search motorcycle parts in San Francisco had only four results. All four are relevant; they are indeed stores that sell motorcycle parts, though three out of four are for BMWs. (Note: to get to Yellow Page results, click on Yellow Pages on the right hand side of the page. Then click on [full] to expand Yellow Page results across the search result page.) By contrast, Yahoo Local’s motorcycle parts in San Francisco returned 40 results. The small amount of results on A9 tells me that the search I entered obviously does not match their classification data because there should be many more listings. It also should be a flag to A9 that I need a little help at this point. Motorcycle parts is not so crazy a query that the engine can’t map it up to something like motorcycles, which returns 66 results because all of the listings are classified in the Motorcyles and Scooters category.

But I will take the initiative and refine my query to motorcycle repair, which has 33 results as well as displaying a matching category and breadcrumb trail: Autos, Boats & Vehicles > Motorcycles & Scooters > Repair & Service . And as readers of the Lounge know, I love my categories. Of the ten results on page one, eight had pictures of the shops, leaving two without photos. Next to the list of results is a map that shows the locations for each place. The search results page is all pretty straightforward with the displayed listings having addresses and phone numbers.

But things change after clicking on a listing’s link. The links take users to an Amazon interface and that is where the photos of the businesses are. There are some other things to see here — in fact maybe too many things because the page comes with the full Amazon frame — like a link to look at other businesses on the same street, maps and directions, customer reviews, a link to call the business over the Internet, and the ability for business owners to update listing information. But there is one big, gaping absence: there is no web site address listed for the business. There is a field called web site on each businesses’ update listing page, so hopefully they will get more active incorporating these as well as incorporating external web sites and external reviews.

So, now what about those photographs? They are certainly an attention-getting feature, and they are useful, but right now I am not committed to them being very useful. If you’re kind of bored, cruising around and looking at places can be fun. And if you’re really bored, assigning the best pictures to familiar businesses is like a scavenger hunt.

But there are some useful things about them. In my opinion, A9’s Yellow Pages is not mainly intended for general shopping information, it’s more for finding things like what a particular restaurant looks like. The photos are visual reminders not only of what a place looks like, but also how to get there, where to park, and what the physical space around a location is like. The photos can also be helpful for locating businesses that are in walking distance from each other or from a current location, particularly in a dense city like San Francisco where oftentimes there are many businesses within walking distance of each other. Also, the cameras captured real images. The images are not edited in any way, so they provide a real-life view, for better or worse. A couple of friends and I were checking out a business we used to work for and saw a photo of someone we knew walking in to the office to start her day. So in that way, it can be fun to play around with.

Conclusions
The data currently associated with businesses is very straightforward. There are phone numbers and addresses, but no web site URLs. So that is an obvious area for improvement. Since not every business currently has photos, I’m sure that’s another area being worked on. The results I got for searches were all relevant, but the engine could do more to help me with my searches. Things like spell checking and better category matching.

I would also like to be able to enter a street address and then work my way backwards from the map to the businesses on a particular street. If that feature exists, I couldn’t figure how to get to it. That would be particularly useful if I couldn’t remember the name of someplace I visited, but I remembered the intersection it was near. Right now you can sometimes game the system by searching for a street because there are often businesses that have the street name included in them, but it’s hit or miss.

The real question is, how useful is seeing a photograph of a local business? Obviously it has a coolness factor, but will it bring users back over time?

All in all, here’s my opinion. I think as it stands in its current implementation A9’s Yellow Pages is an intriguing search tool. It is unique because the photos they took are not found elsewhere. It is useful in reminding me what a place looks like on the outside, or so I can send a photo of a business to other people for review. It is also useful for checking out places I’ve never been to, just to get an external sense of what someplace looks like.

But, I think that A9 is cooking up something bigger and better for their photos than what we see now. I don’t know what exactly that’ll be, but maybe they’ll figure out a way to hook up series of photographs together to provide panoramic images, such as showing a broader picture of a whole block or area. Or, and this is the big one I’m really hoping for, maybe interior photos will become available so that I can see what it looks like inside and outside a restaurant or bar. In that case these external photos will act as of a lure to get local business owners and the general public to upload interior photos. I don’t really expect A9 to strap cameras on people’s heads and go into every business, but neither did I expect them to strap cameras on top of cars and drive around cities.

I don’t know what it’s all leading to, but I’m very curious to follow their path and see where they go with this.