YP hired Crowdflower to conduct an extensive benchmarking analysis of its local search relevance vs. Google, Bing and Yahoo. Thousands of queries were looked at in a blind comparison scenario.
Today it released the results of that year-long effort. The conclusion: YP beats all search engines when it comes to local relevance of results (as measured by user-satisfaction rating).
This is what the quality raters saw in every case (no brand, only results):
There were asked to rate each query result on a scale from bad to perfect. Presumably this reflected whether the results matched the query and their expectations.
This is what they found in terms of user satisfaction (as a proxy for search relevance) across a query set of 13,000 local search keywords for November 2012:
I’ve written up the findings in more detail at Search Engine Land. Do you accept or disbelieve them? If the latter, why?
March 7th, 2013 at 10:14 am
I was about to comment “I don’t believe it based on my own anecdotal data form using yp.com” but I just did a few searches and was genuinely surprised at how much better the results are now!
It used to do crazy things like show me mexican restaurants in Encino when searching for Mexican Restaurants in East Los Angeles – an area that has dozens of famous mexican joints and about 20 miles from Encino. Now it gives me all the local flavor.
March 7th, 2013 at 10:19 am
Fascinating research. They have been doing a great job with their product lately so its not surprising that they have satisfied customers. Unfortunately having a great product alone is not enough to combat the dominance of Google, Yelp or Yahoo when it comes to local discovery, especially when the difference between them in terms of customer satisfaction is not very large.
March 7th, 2013 at 10:12 pm
YP.com seems to have significantly changed their results since G last spidered the site. I see CitySearch reviews added. .As a long-time YP advertiser, it’s good the locals are segregated from ‘national sites’ in their online pages (which is definitely not the way they’re displayed in print.). This day’s displays are definitely more helpful to consumers looking for Local, but in the not-too-distant past, ‘national sites’ were displayed much more prominently in YP.com’s SERPs.
Maybe they’ve learned that consumers looking for local companies really want LOCAL results. I stopped using YP.com for seeking local merchants when my own business was buried behind national companies and I’ll bet a whole lot of other local merchants did the same.
It harmed Local business and harmed the YP reputation, too. Hope someone who care about the brand is now at the helm.
March 8th, 2013 at 10:50 am
Wow, that is really surprising. The only problem is, is that Google has such a grasp over the consumer search market that even with these results, YP is going to have a hard time reaching the top.
March 16th, 2013 at 10:11 am
As a person who worked for them in the early 2000′s it’s good to see that they’ve finally put some effort into the user experience rather than Only focusing on quarter – to – quarter advertising revenue. Now for tricky part… Bringing in the users. I can only hope they understand the common sense truth that success on the Web contains equal parts site awareness and good content. They’re two inseparable elements. So now Please focus intently on the generating a user base. You’ve done a good job buy too early for back pats.