Speaking Sensis

Sensis’ recent move to open up its advertiser listings to search engines poses a question about the relationship between search engines and local search directories. Are they friends? Foes? Just dating? Not all is as it seems.

Right now, as we speak, the yellow.com.au web site is being vigorously ‘crawled’.

Now, let me just say, before the image of bug armies and full body rashes takes hold and you’re rushing out for a trusty bottle of Calamine Lotion, this is good news.

Recently, yellow.com.au opened up its advertiser pages. That means search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live can ‘crawl’ and ‘index’ those pages. In other words, find the pages and include them in their search listings.

The net effect of this is that references to Yellow™ ads will begin to appear in the organic listings on search engines.

That’s a big step, and this move has created a pretty fair buzz around the search industry.

More importantly, it adds even greater muscle to the potential reach of Yellow™ advertising. In just the first month, these search engine listings have driven over 500,000 references into yellow.com.au.

But this move also raises a question. As Julian Bajkowski commented in the Financial Review on 24 July,

“… the decision to expose about 2 million directory advertiser listings to search engines has put a question mark over the future of relationships between search companies and content providers”.

Over the next few weeks, I want to explore this relationship, because not all is as it seems.

For years now search engines and local search directories, have been seen as competitors.

But it’s really not that simple. In reality, these so-called competitive services are very complementary.

Having search engines and local search working together can potentially produce a greater outcome for advertisers than taking an ‘us vs them’ view.

The trick to appreciating how comes from an understanding of what makes search and local search unique – both to each other and to all other forms of advertising.

Which we’ll start digging into next time.