Comments on: Local Search’s Lacuna

By: Chris Travers

Chris Travers — Thu, 13 May 2010 12:01:04 +0000

This is Chris from Universal Business Listing – great post again on the subject. We do in fact make the UBL data available free to any legitimate publisher and have done so for over a year. We now have an API for it to be accessed in real-time if you like – we just need to approve the IP address from which the data is pulled. The only reason we gate the output of the data at all is that we are weekly distinguishing the requests from “developer/publishers” and from marketers who are looking for fresh kill to spam. As you can imagine, our businesses are coming to UBL to get their data distributed to hundreds of legitimate sites and mobile devices, not to get pitched. We are very sensitive to that and will take issue with even popular directories who over-use our listings for lead generation. But the real issue is about quality and breadth of data. Even the start-up directories or location based services know that you have to have a comprehensive database – and even in an ideal world you are not going to get EVERY business to submit a profile even if you paid them to do it. Also, it becomes apparent very quickly that the data changes substantially every month. So these “developers” can figure out that they can pay $200 for 20 million listings of suspect quality and freshness or they can pay to get constantly refreshed data from professional sources like infoGoup, Acxiom, D&B – all of whom we work with too. We find that almost any developer creating a real product figures this out soon – what we like to see is them using a good underlying database and getting fresh, enhanced data directly from UBL!

By: Silver

Silver — Wed, 12 May 2010 23:43:53 +0000

Brownbook would need to publish their API documentation and allow developers to sign up without a form-to-mail, similar to signing up for other widely-used APIs before it can serve as a truly open local database. They apparently were more open briefly, but they told me that they didn’t see much developer adoption. I think they didn’t leave their API stable for long enough for developers to really use them, and they’re better known in the UK than here in the US. So, they didn’t keep the API open enough for long enough for it to start getting lift.

By: Mike Stewart

Mike Stewart — Wed, 12 May 2010 22:27:36 +0000

I was never fond of the traditional YP A-Z method of listing companies. Doesn’t make sense. I also stated that folks no longer need the print for finding business contact information and more for finding products and services (leaning heavily towards rural markets and those without iPhones). It is nice to see them also admit that only 1 in 9 want a white pages book. Next step is to realize that YP needs to be opt-in as well.

YP companies need to move away from a sales model and towards that of service. They also need to stop trying to sell just one car model on the lot and continue partnerships/distribution agreements like YP and CitySearch etc.

Maybe it is time the print industry realize that Greed doesn’t work when you are fighting a monster like Google, and that collaberation is the key to longterm viability.

Just my opinion. Thanks for sharing.

By: Mike Stewart

Mike Stewart — Wed, 12 May 2010 22:18:53 +0000

Chris,

What are your thoughts on BrownBook’s website? Also, do you think a site that can aggregate information in a frame work that incorporates social and local would be something consumers would gravitate to as well as enterprise corporations attempting to juggle the work/life/social mix?

Such as Core + (Core Plus) in Dallas ?