Reading Time: 5 minutes

The Garmin nüvi 1390 GPS is a slim, 4.3-inch screen beauty that is currently vying for my attention, but will I succumb to its electronic charms?

Table of Contents

Features

4.3-inch touch screen
Whereis map
Bluetooth
Lane Assist
Spoken street names
Route Options
Junction View
ecoRoute
Traffic (1390T model, not tested)

Navigation

Includes a comparison with TomTom GO 730

I recently used and reviewed the TomTom GO 730 before trying the Garmin nuvi 1390. I also went to most of the same destinations in Melbourne as before, so I was able to compare the two devices.

The windscreen suction cup of the Garmin is excellent. It has a lever to manage the suction and the cup surface is soft and glossy, so the unit never fell off, unlike the TomTom (a few times). I always wipe the windscreen when I remove the holders before parking in public, so both devices had the same clean surface.

Being a perennial geek, I preferred the TomTom’s eight screens of Settings and three levels of other menus. The Garmin has just two screens of Settings and far fewer options to fiddle with.

: Just two main choices – a no brainer!

For example, the only audible alert you can select out of the box is Garmin Safety Cameras. A technophobe will be happier with the Garmin’s controls – for example – its single Language menu shows three buttons for:

Voice Language
Text Language (affects displayed text only, not map data)
Keyboard Language

This approach avoids my initial problem with the TomTom where I chose US English for the device when setting it up initially and later chose UK English for the computer voice and wondered why I was hearing American terminology.

The computer voice sounds very human, so spoken street names are comprehensible. There was no spelling out of abbreviations such as W-B-N-D for Westbound. Roundabouts are called roundabouts.

: nuvi 1390 keyboard

The keyboard is fine, but I didn’t identify the pencil eraser to be the backspace key until I realised that the left arrow was a cursor-left key.

A typed POI takes forever to resolve.

A typed POI took forever to resolve and I gave up, preferring to select one of the available choices.

: My favourite GPS stress test

: Go 250 m and then make a U-turn!

The 1390 correctly guided me (coming from the city) to Deakin University (Burwood campus) and told me to turn left, not right, as was the case with the TomTom. However, I had barely entered the campus, when it told me to do a u-turn! At least this got me into the campus, not halfway across the tram tracks, as the TomTom wanted me to.

Advanced Lane Guidance consists of a photo-realistic image (not based on the actual landmark ahead) where the recommended lane signs are in colour and the others in grey.

The current changes to the Montague St exit will have to wait for a future update

I found time to test the 1390 in other parts of Melbourne, from Cranbourne North through Geelong and Bacchus Marsh and points in-between. I was generally pleased with its guidance overall.

POIs

The POIs (Points of Interest) might disappoint. POIs are destinations you may wish to visit without knowing their precise address, e.g. Chadstone Shopping Centre, Melbourne University, Pharmacy, Restaurant, Movie Theatre, and so on.

The Garmin nuvi 1390 has a very American (not surprising) set of POIs. For example, the Food and Drink set has cuisines such as:

All Food
American
Asian
British Isles
Cafe or Diner
Deli or Bakery
Fast Food
French
German
International
Italian
Mexican
Other
Pizza
Seafood
Specialty Food Products
Steak or Grill

In my strongly Italian suburb the POIs show just two pizza outlets, one being Domino’s. Among the rest in other suburbs, Domino’s is the single predominant brand and barely a Pizza Hut in sight. (No sad loss, IMO, but that’s beside the point). There are just four “American” restaurants in all of Melbourne: three are Chili’s (I had no idea they had Chili’s here) and one TGIF in Chapel St. “British Isles” means fish and chips stores! No chicken tikka masala? Fast Food hides the other pizza shops among the usual suspects.

Shopping includes Computer/Software but the closest ones look like private homes. The other annoyance is that the suburb is not shown, which becomes a problem once you go beyond your home suburb.

: Computer stores in private homes?

An aside

I mentioned in my TomTom GO 730 review that my reference point for a car GPS is the Magellan Maestro 3225, a low-end device that I used for two weeks in the US. We needed to find a pharmacy near E. Sycamore Avenue, El Segundo (our motel) and the nearest one it found didn’t exist at the stated address (230 S La Brea Ave, Inglewood). So we picked the next one (3331 W Century Blvd, Inglewood) and did our business there. On our way back to the motel, we saw a Walgreens less than a mile away (331 N Sepulveda Blvd, El Segundo) that wasn’t in the Magellan’s POIs. Annoying.

There are two reasons for the disappointing POIs:

The data supplier here is Yellow Pages® which certainly has all the pizza outlets in its collection, but since Garmin only features the “Pizza” heading, it only shows the businesses that chose to be in that heading. Many other pizza shops chose to be listed as Take Away Food, Restaurants, etc.
The problem with having POIs in any GPS is having enough internal storage space. The 2007-vintage Magellan has 2 GB internal storage with 795 MB free. The 2008 maps were more comprehensive, but I didn’t have them.

Behaviour Modification

In the TomTom GO 730 review I complained about a recommended route for my daily commute to the Sensis HQ in Lonsdale St. I used to come along Footscray Road and turned left into Dudley St and kept going until I had to turn right at the Queen Victoria Market roundabout, then left up Lonsdale St.

The nuvi 1390 (and the GO 730) recommends the following route:

This route has me waiting for as much as 3 minutes at the Docklands Drive/Dudley St intersection (car on the map above) to go straight, then left at La Trobe St, right at Spencer St, then left up Lonsdale St. I had never tried that route because of the usual red light and reasoned that I’d be a fair way up Dudley St by the time it changed.

In the interests of fair reporting, I decided to try it and was pleasantly surprised. Yes, the longest wait at the light was 3 minutes, depending on traffic from the cross roads. The rest of this route is relatively a dream run. On the other hand, Dudley St inches along if there are some fruit trucks crawling uphill to the markets and you need your wits about you as there are a couple of sharp angles to manouevre.

I am happy to report that I have modified my driving behaviour and accepted the Garmin/TomTom/Whereis map recommendation as the better option.

Bluetooth

When paired with a mobile phone via Bluetooth, you can make hands-free phone calls to your contact list and to the POI phone numbers. You still have to tap the screen to receive a call, so the device could be out of reach in a large car if you like to stick it at the bottom of the windscreen.

Conclusion

Overall, the Garmin Nuvi 1390 is a delight to use. I would like a GPS to be a little of TomTom and a little of Garmin, but that’s how it is with many things.

Amazon link.

A better Google Maps from Yellow Maps NZ

29 September 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Local Search 2 Comments

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Yellow Pages Group NZ has done the seemingly impossible – it has delivered a better Google Maps for New Zealand with a beautifully rendered integration with Yellow (Pages) content. The clean interface is devoid of ads (so far).

Ensure that JavaScript is enabled and head over to Yellow Maps for a look. You will find Google Maps overlaid with three search panels on the left, which can be hidden, collapsed, or expanded:

Table of Contents

Find a Location

Enter a location or browse some popular destinations. I tried “Paradise”, having seen that aptly named place once from the point where the road North of Glenorchy (near Queenstown) ends. I also looked up some of my old stomping grounds in Greenlane, St Kilda and the Otago university environs. Great, screen-wide Google map, with Satellite view but no Street View. Why not?

Business Search

The familiar What and Where input fields let you look up any business. I tried “Cadbury” in “Dunedin”, expecting to find a famous landmark (It’s at 280 Cumberland St). Unfortunately, all I got was the Leviathan Hotel a few blocks away. The real Google Maps has no trouble finding it. When I tried “Cadbury New Zealand”, I got 33 results, none being the chocolate manufacturer. Uh oh. I was enjoying this site until now.

A flyout reveals a selection of Yellow categories. I tried “Automotive” and was unsettled when I clicked one of the results and ended up in Auckland. Clicking the flyout category populates the What search box but leaves Where empty, so you get a country-wide set of results, but the names don’t usually give a clue as to the location. I’d prefer the search box to preserve my last location until I clear it. Apart from this quirk, this is a great way to display some advertisers.

Street View comes into view (pardon the pun) if there is a Yellow listing with a physical address.

Later this evening, Business Search isn’t working at all (the status bar tells me “Transferring data from secure-nz.imrworldwide.com but nothing is coming through), although Accommodation Search is. Teething pains? After reloading the page, the app worked normally (it found me an electrician in Bluff) but an hour later the page was still “Transferring data from mt1.google.com”. The typical non-geek won’t notice that. I should mention I use Firefox 3.5.3, because the same page and search worked perfectly in IE8 – makes sense as it is an IIS 7.0 web server.

Transferring data, transferring…

Accommodation Search

Accommodation providers can be found through another pair of Where/Name search fields. You can filter by price and sort by price or name. It’s useful to see at a glance the room rates on the map, so a budget-conscious user can weigh the cost against the inconvenience of staying a little further away from some location.

You can check availability of a room and make a booking too (via BookIt). This search type was the coolest feature for me. I looked up accommodation in Alexandra but was given just one result. This couldn’t be right for Queenstown’s poor neighbour, where many budget-conscious people stay. Sure enough, the Business Search for “motels” in “Alexandra” produced 25 results, as did Yellow proper (17 found).

Despite all the glitches noted, YPG is to be complimented for delivering an attractive, informative site that adds value to Yellow advertisers and users alike. No, they didn’t pay me to say that. 🙂 Google is the elephant in every IYP’s room, particularly Google Maps, so it is refreshing to see this implementation by YPG NZ, which could well become every Kiwi’s default map destination.

Yellow is the core brand

YPG appears to have moved its revenue-earning White Pages product under the Yellow brand. The http://www.whitepages.co.nz/ URL redirects to http://yellow.co.nz/whitepages/. Many North American IYPs have moved their residential content to the Yellow Pages site and they don’t usually have a separate Map product. They just license one of the third-party map offerings to enhance their listings. This must surely reduce internal competition and duplication of effort.

TomTom GO 730 Review

17 September 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Hardware 2 Comments

Reading Time: 6 minutes

One of my employer Sensis’s other business units is Whereis.com, which supplies maps to some big GPS vendors such as Garmin, TomTom and Hewlett-Packard. I have been thinking of buying one for a while, as I am doing a lot of “Dad’s taxi” duties in unexplored parts of Melbourne.

Last Christmas our family drove around California and Nevada. My Nokia N95’s GPS was not up to the task (without the turn-by-turn guidance option), so a friend gifted me a Magellan Maestro 3225 that I absolutely swear by, despite its being a very basic model. I have used only Magellan NeverLost units in Hertz rental cars for the past nine years, so I am comfortable with the guidance given by Magellan devices. For better or worse, that is my benchmark.

So I borrowed this TomTom Go 730 and gave it a road test for a couple of weeks. It comes with a desk stand that is powered by a USB cable connected to your PC. This enables you to manage it with the PC application known as TomTom Home. You also get a windscreen suction cup mount (that sticks most of the time) and a cigarette lighter charging cable.

The device sells for between AU$443 – AU$648 in Australia and US$180 (used) – US$350 in the US. You only get one national map with it, i.e. Australia for us.

Table of Contents

User Interface

The touch-screen 4.3-inch display works well with a light tap. No concerns there. The bottom of the screen below an active route map contains the vital information – lane guidance, distance to next turn, time and distance to destination, actual speed relative to the last known speed for the road. If an optional traffic receiver is purchased, you also get some more recent information to the right.

Many undercover car parks in Melbourne CBD.

Features

Maps provided by Sensis Whereis
Text-to-speech (aka spoken street names)
FM transmitter
MP3 player
Bluetooth
Map Share
IQ Routes

The Bluetooth function works with my Nokia phone but I was expecting the FM transmitter to relay the sound to the car FM radio. That is not the case. The transmitter is for you to play MP3s over the car sound system. I can’t imagine many people would bother to load an SD card for this purpose. Most people wishing to do this probably own an FM transmitter or cassette tape adapter, while some modern cars provide such a cable for your player. Somehow, I also expected the FM transmitter to work over my preferred radio station, to interrupt the music when a phone call came in or when the GPS felt compelled to speak. No such luck. You have to choose a vacant frequency for it and listen to your own MP3s. No problems here for me, as I leave the radio on low volume and let the GPS compete with it when it talks.

At one time, the transmitter also sent the navigation instructions to the radio, but this feature was disabled in early 2009.

You can set your home telephone number and make it a convenient button.

As can be expected, you can change many preferences for the mobile phone such as auto-answer, since you don’t want to lean forward to press the “Take this call” button.

Voices

The device talks to you in several languages, including Australian, New Zealand, USA and UK flavours of English in male or female variants. You also get a computer voice – also known as “Spoken Street Names” or text-to-speech (TTS) in UK English.

I had to rewrite this section because I had unfairly maligned the device for mixing US English and UK English words. When I set up the device I had chosen US English as the language of the device, but this is separate from the voice preference. Therefore, I was baffled when the UK English computer voice referred to roundabouts as rotaries, when parts of the US also call them roundabouts or traffic circles. Three weeks later, I read some discussions about this oddity and learnt how to fix my error. It would be better if Australian units came with the most likely settings already enabled for this country – or the software determined that from the map coordinates.

I found the male Australian voice too slow for my patience as I don’t live in Queensland (ducks), so I tried the male New Zealand one, being a dual citizen of Aotearoa and Oz. It knew motorways but not freeways.

I didn’t mind the TTS synthesiser voice even though it mispronounced some “easy” location and street names – the Magellan had this problem too in the US and I believe this is a universal problem with TTS. It could pronounce “Somerville Road” correctly, but it said “Werribee” as “Werrib” and “Geelong” as “Geelo”. I can get used to these quirks, for the added benefit of spoken street names, which are not available if you choose the human voices.

And if you don’t like any of the supplied voices, you can record your own 57 words and phrases!

Colours

The maps can be displayed in Day or Night colours. If you don’t like the included choices, you can download others from places such as the TomTom Forum.

Alerts

I advise against turning on all Point of Interest (POI) displays, as they can fill up the display to the extent that you can’t see the map underneath. You don’t really want to turn on an audible alert for these POIs otherwise you will get a constant stream of beeps as you approach each POI.

Downtown Melbourne is full of two-bit colleges and the alerts drove me batty. I had turned them on because I thought I’d be warned about school zones.Just turn them on as you need them.

(As an aside, I wonder if there are GPSs that change the speed warning to 40 km/h at school zones during the nominated time ranges.)

Safety Preferences

You can turn on safety features such as driving break reminders, driving faster than the speed limit, and so on.

Navigation

Getting you from A to B is the main role of any car GPS. The GO 730 is fine for that most of the time. I liked it when I was stuck in traffic and it piped up, “Arrival time 7:12 am. You are still on the quickest route.” I also like the absence of nagging when I deviate from the recommended route. My Magellan tells me loudly, “recalculating route”, whereas the TomTom silently adjusts to the new location and keeps working.

The IQ Routes feature apparently takes real user data to find the “smartest” route, which means the quickest. I usually travel along Footscray Road, turn left at Dudley St, then right at Vic Markets on William St, then left up Lonsdale St as per the following map from Whereis.com:

The guidance given by Whereis.com and by the GO 930 is as follows:

This route appears to be faster because it is a wider road or the bridge over the railway line is faster to traverse (50 km/h on the bridge vs 60 km/h on Dudley St can’t be faster) than the road below the railway line at Dudley St. However, getting to the bottom of La Trobe St from Footscray Rd is often a long traffic light cycle, when I could be almost at Spencer St if I went up Dudley St. Perhaps my travels will eventually get noted by IQ Routes (or I will continue to take the non-recommended route.)

You can adjust the calculated route, although you’d want to be stationary at the time. New laws are coming into force soon, which will make it more expensive if caught adjusting a GPS while driving.

Map Share enables you to accept corrections and updates made by users and you can choose from a range of accuracies, e.g. “TomTom verified” through to “Everything”.

There are some more anomalies:

Some POIs are misplaced. For me a regular destination is Deakin University, Burwood Campus (approaching from the Monash Freeway side). When it comes into view on the left, the device tells me to turn right.
Usually a turn left/right voice alert is on time, that is, gives me enough time to react. Sometimes it comes too late. I have another infrequent destination in Glen Waverley that I always seem to miss and the turn alert happens too late. It’s a left turn fairly soon after you exit the freeway. This could be dangerous if I slammed on the brakes – I once had to detour several kilometres because I missed my turn.
Sometimes the computer voice can distract until you get used to it. It spells out some words in a sentence such as “s-t-a-t-e route 22” (a numbered state highway) and “continue on the Princes Freeway w-b-n-d” (westbound). Why?
The Route Planner (web app in beta) does not recognise any Australian address I tried, so it’s useless for us for the time being.

You can buy a new map once a year but it seems that people just buy a new unit every two or three years.

Conclusion

I enjoyed using the TomTom GO 730 for three weeks and would be happy to use it in my car. Compared to my benchmark, the Magellan, this is clearly the superior device (but I did say that the Maestro 3225 is a very basic model).

I will soon check out a Garmin nuvi 1390 and an HP Ipaq unit, so let’s see which one I like the most. Although there are many sub-$150 devices on the market, particularly during a sale, you don’t get the cooler features until you look at pricier models. Isn’t that true of most gadgets? :smile:

Take screenshots of TomTom GPS

13 September 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Hardware No Comments

Reading Time: < 1 minute

To capture screenshots of your TomTom GPS (at least works in a GO 730), do the following:

Connect the device to your PC
Use Windows Explorer to view the device root folder
Create a folder called screen
Go inside that folder and create an empty text file using Notepad.exe called capture (no extension).
Restart the device.

To take a screenshot, tap the screen in the top left, preferably to avoid pressing a valid button. You will hear a camera shutter-like sound and the capture will be stored in the \screen\ directory as a BMP file.

Does Bing Search know Bing?

1 September 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Search Engines No Comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes

While doing my tests on Bing Local Search for IYPs, I noticed something odd. I was reading up on the Microsoft Bing onebox – the panel of eight local results and a map you get at the top of the SERP when you search for something including a place name. e.g. “Denver florist”.

First, I cleared all cookies and did not log in to either search engine.

I searched for “bing onebox” (in Bing) and was taken aback. Of the first 10 results, eight were about the great actor/singer Bing Crosby and two were about the search engine. For comparison, the same search in Google produced nine results about the search engine and one about Bing Crosby. Who’s right?

The Bing algorithm associated the individual words in “onebox” with “the number one box office draw” (a phrase repeated by many of the eight sites) and hence this result. So, Bing has stemming covered. As search marketers we tend to think of Google’s ten-pack as the only onebox (or one box) of consequence.

Let’s try searching for just “Bing”. The best match result is the search engine itself. The News results are also about the search engine. The next four results are interesting:

Bing Crosby’s Wikipedia entry
Bing energy drink
Bing SDK for iPhone
Bing Mail (an Australian product since 2001)

Then three results from Discover Bing; three from the Bing product guide; three from the Bing Cashback program; and finally, four video results, with two about the search engine.

Using Google for the same search term (“bing”), the results are similar:

The first two are the Bing search engine.
The next two are Wikipedia of which the first is the search engine; the next about Crosby.
The News results are all about the search engine.
The last five results are also about the search engine, as are the two video results.
Curiously, the related searches are weird, but there’s an algorithm for you:
- bingo
- steve bing
- bing bandwidth
- bing linux
- bing cosby
- ding
- bing network
- ning

My conclusion is that Google’s algo associates the word “Bing” primarily with the search engine, which is bad news for the energy drink and mail company. Microsoft Bing’s algo is kinder to the searcher. Its architects are making an allowance that Internet users still include people who know of Bing Crosby and of other concepts that include this word. I think this is a good thing.

Google testing Preferences link

28 August 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Search Engines No Comments

Reading Time: < 1 minute

While using the Google NZ and Google AU search engines today I noticed the preferences link had disappeared from its usual location to the right of the basic search box. It was replaced by a new Search Settings link at the top right. Here is the new home page:

Compare it with the Google.com home page:

Nothing major, but we get Groups, while the global version gets Shopping.

Your directory is not bigger than mine

28 August 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Directory No Comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Saw via the Kelsey Group blog that the New Zealand Yellow™ publishers have asked Tradesmen Direct (TD) to remove a claim on their website that it is the largest directory of tradespersons in NZ.

TD claims to have 18,000 trades listings, whereas Yellow claims to have more than 10,000 listings for builders alone, never mind electricians, plasterers and other tradespeople.

Details: Nelson Mail

ynz

It appears that TD has removed that claim from the website, or it’s well hidden, but I was surprised that Yellow even bothered to contact TD. It probably gave free publicity to TD.

Speaking from an SEO perspective, Yellow™ has nothing to worry about from TD. Barely 1000 pages have been indexed and none of my test searches (google.co.nz, pages from NZ, but done in Australia) had TD above Yellow.

The search for Manukau car valet was great, with four Yellow results in the top 20. TD had a valid result but it was at #67.

Yellow fared well with Lower Hutt pest control, with five results. TD had none in the top 100.

I next tried a couple of heartland searches, for TD is based in Nelson and Tahunanui is nearby, hence Tahunanui plumber. Yellow had six results (!) in the top 20 – two from its main www domain, two from a duplicate www2 subdomain and two from its maps domain. If you can accept that gasfitters are usually qualified plumbers (?) then all its results were on target. A TD result was much lower but it was the home page and thus not a relevant page.

Nelson plasterer would surely be a cinch for TD, I thought. No cigar for the first 100 results. Yellow and its three subdomains (www, www2 and maps) were there.

Nelson carpenter was a disappointment for both. Yellow had a result at #90, but TD had none.

The search for East Tamaki carpenter was interesting. Google picked two results for Yellow for unrelated businesses (Steel processing and Industrial fasteners) located on Carpenter Road, East Tamaki, not actual carpenters. TD didn’t show in the first 100 results. However, on the TD site, the same search produced two results for unrelated headings (Sheet metal engineers and Forwarders):

etcarpenter The Yellow site had no problem in finding five real carpenters in East Tamaki.

etcarp

Of course, TD’s PHPMyDirectory script is no match for Yellow’s industrial strength platform powered by Local Matters.

Christchurch fencing contractor had the usual six results for Yellow but none for TD. I had had enough of testing by this stage.

Businesses contemplating advertising in an Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) or business directory should take the time to search for their own category (heading) in Google and a few other related categories to see if pages from the IYP rank in the top 20 results. New IYPs need to get SEO right from the get go if they are to get anywhere. I use the PHPMyDirectory script for a couple of free directories and can vouch that it is not optimised out of the box. It needs tweaks.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9815bvJrKw[/youtube]

It’s also about apples and oranges. Mature businesses such as Yellow can provide wider reach than just the website channel – print, voice, mobile and now the Sheep Launcher-beating Yellow iPhone app!

41% of mobile internet users are looking for information on products and services

20 August 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Marketing 1 Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

My colleague Wayne Aspland has written a concise summary of the 34-page Sensis® e-Business Report, which was just released. Read his post, entitled Sensis® e-Business Report: Half of Australia’s young adults have used the mobile Internet.

Here are some insights from the report:

97 per cent computer ownership level for small businesses and 98 per cent ownership for medium businesses
63 percent of SMEs own notebooks
Over a quarter of all Australians over the age of 14 have now accessed the mobile internet.
41% of mobile internet users are looking for information on products and services, making it the number one mobile activity. And number three, at 36%, is looking for suppliers of products or services.

The last point is very interesting for Yellow Pages® advertisers, particularly when you see the factoid in Wayne’s post that mobile usage almost tripled in one year.

Questioning the “Opt-In for White Pages and Opt-Out for Yellow Pages” concept

20 August 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Directory 5 Comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Greg Sterling’s blog has a guest post by Alex Algard, CEO of whitepages.com, which begins with a thought-provoking statement:

The Right Course: Opt-In for White Pages and Opt-Out for Yellow Pages

His website has launched BanThePhoneBook.org, because:

We at WhitePages are passionate about building awareness of the waste created by the white pages books and providing them only on an opt-in basis, but I think it would be a mistake to draw similar conclusions for the yellow pages.

Call me cynical, but people who are passionate about the environment tackle the core issues, not specific products. They chain themselves to logging equipment or camp atop tall trees that are about to be felled. They join GreenPeace and similar bodies. Perhaps Alex does all that as well. :smile:

The whitepages.com blog contains statements such as:

The environmental impact and economic costs are mind-boggling: WhitePages estimates that 5M trees need to be harvested each year to print ~147M white pages phone books. And the costs to recycle these books each year costs taxpayers an estimated $17M. (Are you kidding? Any way you look at it these estimates, the numbers are absolutely staggering.)

and

Consumers are unaware of the environmental waste of printing the WPPB: When asked if they knew that millions of trees are cut down each year to print the WPPB each year, 74% of survey respondents answered ‘No’. And Less than 16% recycle their old books (that’s nuts).

Quite rightly, one of the comments came from Ken Clark, a consultant to the Yellow Pages industry in the US. He questioned the above figures and pointed to an eye-opening, well-illustrated article about how paper used for US directories is made by NPI – no trees are cut down expressly to make directories. Ken says that the paper is made from four ingredients:

Wood chips from saw mill byproducts
Old newspaper/white paper, and old telephone directories
Dried kraft pulp
Wood Chips

It’s great to support online services (it pays my bills), but singling out specific print products to “ban” and setting up a website to that end only fools the gullible or the ignorant. If I surveyed consumers and asked questions based on made-up facts, of course I will get the answers I want. Not everyone uses the Internet for everything, even if the stats show that almost every home is connected to the Internet.

Many directory company websites have information about recycling and links to authoritative sites on the subject. My employer’s site is no exception and I was a bit surprised to see them mention that some people use the directories to prop up monitors. :smile: It’s no wonder that the spine also carries advertising!

In many First World countries, the printed White Pages are delivered to every household because the law requires it. These books contain essential information that citizens may need in an emergency, such as poisons, first aid, life lines, etc — at least in Australia. Check yours before you chuck it out and blog about it.

IYP ranking check without specifying the state

19 August 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Local Search SEO No Comments

Reading Time: < 1 minute

While discussing the previous post, SEO ranking of US IYPs across 274 cities, Chris Silver Smith pointed out that Americans are not likely to specify the state abbreviation when searching locally, unless the location name occurs in many parts of the US, e.g. Springfield. So I ran a quick check for (location) divorce attorney across the 274 localities. Here is the result:

Superpages.com improved in the higher ranked results. To save you from opening the earlier post, here is the earlier check with the abbreviated state inserted, e.g. Salinas CA divorce attorney.

For Superpages.com there isn’t much difference in the weighted score; however, for the other sites there are slight differences in positions or they fall out completely.

I did a Bing check as well, which shows good rankings for IYPs not listed above. I’ll upload it soon.

SEO ranking of US IYPs across 274 cities

16 August 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Local Search SEO 17 Comments

Reading Time: 8 minutes

As the in-house SEO for the Aussie Yellow Pages® Online I follow the local search scene, such as it is, but I rely on the writings of North Americans for detailed analyses of US IYPs.

For example, Greg Sterling. Back in 2007 he wrote Using IYPs as an SEO Strategy, where he wrote about the Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) being a proxy for search engine visibility through good SEO. In the comments below that post, Chris Silver Smith writes about his time as SEO for Superpages.com and some of the considerations for Google/Yahoo/Bing SEO for IYPs. Next, David Mihm who specialises in Local SEO.

Another local search specialist is Andrew Shotland, who has just published IYP SEO Rankings Report 2009. This article was picked up in my alert for Kelsey Group Blog. Andrew’s rankings intrigued me. I had not heard of some of the IYPs he mentioned – not surprising when they don’t appear high in searches.

Superpages
Citysearch
Yelp
Yahoo Local
InsiderPages
YellowPages.com
BizJournals
AreaConnect
MagicYellow
Switchboard
MerchantCircle
GetFave
Yellowbot
Yellowpages.Lycos.com
Kudzu
Discoverourtown
Loqal.com
Local.Ingenio.com
YellowUSA.com
IAF.net

I have been checking mostly Australian/New Zealand/European IYPs for signs of SEO for two years, but Andrew’s article got me wondering whether you can assess the SEO of an IYP by checking 20 keyphrases across 20 cities. I am writing a review of Axandra IBP 11.5, so I thought this was a good exercise for my project. I didn’t want to replicate the whole exercise both as a professional courtesy and through a lack of time (as well as personal relevance).

Usage is king

For any YP/IYP sale of an ad, usage is a crucial part of the offering. After all, advertisers pay for a listing because they expect consumers to find the listing, contact them, and finally buy. If consumers don’t use the directories, advertisers won’t renew.

Usability experts at an IYP work hard to make the site usable; this only matters if there are users, which is where marketing comes in. Traditional marketing and search marketing are equally important. Brand capital brings in the direct and bookmarked visits; SEO brings in search engine visits; PPC fills in the cracks, (unless you have the budget to cover every heading).

SEO at IYPs

SEO has been neglected at some IYPs, while some actually closed their front doors to the search engines in the early days. A handful have embraced SEO with gusto (and succeeded), as can be seen in Andrew’s analysis.

A reality that some IYPs face is not appreciated by some commentators; namely, there isn’t a shortage of SEO know-how but there are limited resources to apply that knowledge. I haven’t looked around, but I suspect that a typical, self-respecting IYP is not a LAMP machine sitting under someone’s desk.

Regardless of the platform, IYP developers are usually busy with ongoing feature enhancements, bug fixes, etc and use some respected testing and deployment methodology. This sometimes delays implementing the “obvious” SEO tactic that others are eager to point out. The SEO can’t walk in and ask for an edit to robots.txt, for example, and get it done on the spot.

Scope of the tests

I have been running fortnightly ranking checks of our own top 100 headings across two metros, giving me 248 keyphrases. Why 100 headings (categories)? It’s a round number and as we have over 2700 of them, I monitor only the most valuable ones. It’s good to compare ranking trends with organic traffic measured internally. But this post is not about the Aussie IYPs, so back to the US.

“Valuable categories” – what does that mean to an IYP? Lots of different things, such as:

Which categories produce the highest yields ($ per sale)?
Which categories bring the highest/lowest revenues?
Which categories are churning?
Which categories get the most/least traffic?

Inside an IYP, different people might have different lists of valuable categories. The retention manager monitors churn categories; the PPC manager needs to know which categories need more traffic, because they aren’t getting organic traffic; the sales managers want to know where traffic is going to, so that they can sell to those niches; and so on.

Take, for example, restaurants or pizza. In some geos, you can’t sell them an IYP package easily because they are always full and are price sensitive. They get a free listing, anyway, but the ones who take out a display ad reap the benefit of increased visibility. The food categories usually get among the highest number of searches at the large IYPs, SEO or no SEO, so it’s not a priority area for me.

For my IBP review I decided to run four sample tests across 28 US IYPs:

50states.com
AreaConnect.com
BizJournals.com
Citysearch.com
dexknows.com
Discoverourtown.com
GetFave.com
IAF.net
ibegin.com
InsiderPages.com
judysbook.com
Kudzu.com
local.com
Local.Ingenio.com
local.yahoo.com
Loqal.com
MagicYellow.com
MerchantCircle.com
openlist.com
Superpages.com
Switchboard.com
yellow.com
yellowbook.com
Yellowbot.com
YellowPages.com
Yellowpages.Lycos.com
YellowUSA.com
Yelp.com

I say tomahto, you say tomato

I chose four keyphrases:

Dentist
Divorce lawyer
Divorce attorney
Doctor

One has to be careful when choosing keyphrases for a test. The larger the IYP, chances are that they have a formal approach to taxonomy. Sometimes, this language is not conducive to SEO because ordinary folks don’t use formal language in a Google search.

Using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to count instances of searches can help. For example, last month in the US, more people used the word “attorney” than “lawyer”. I first opted for “lawyer” for the heck of it (then I tested both).

Breadth of the tests

I wouldn’t be happy testing just the top 20 metros because local search is spread over all suburbs (cities) and that some categories are intrinsically hyper-local, e.g. doctors. I would not do a Google search for Melbourne doctors if I had just moved to this city and wanted one close to my home.

Methodology

The US Census Bureau has a handy list of 274 cities/regions with a population greater than 100,000 people. I chose this list to conduct my tests. One of the flaws in this approach is that some IYPs that are tied to print directories do not cover every part of the US, so including them in a national analysis might be unfair. Therefore, I am not presenting a set of national rankings here. I used the same weighting factor as did Andrew, namely, a #1 ranking is worth 10 points, #2 is worth 9 points and so on. (One could argue about this but it’s fine for this purpose.) I am running the tests on google.com (not .au) from Australia, so there will be some variations compared to tests run in each of the 274 localities.

IYP Rankings Test 1: Dentist

This is a list of keyphrases such as Abilene TX dentist, Boston MA dentist etc for the top 274 localities.

The table above shows ranking instances in the left half; for example, Superpages has 113 #1 placements in the Google SERPs; 24 #2 placements, and so on. In the right half you see the weighted scores – 113 x 10 = 1130, 24 x 9 = 216 and so forth.

IYP Rankings Test 2: Divorce Lawyer

This is a list of keyphrases such as Jackson MS divorce lawyer, Fayetteville NC divorce lawyer, etc for the top 274 localities.

The rankings for this keyphrase set are quite different. Superpages reigns supreme, but IAF.net ranks #2, not second last as per the first test.

IYP Rankings Test 3: Divorce Attorney

This is a list of keyphrases such as Peoria AZ divorce attorney, Fayetteville NC divorce attorney, etc for the top 274 localities. (Yes, Virginia, there is a Peoria in Arizona – I didn’t know this before.)

IAF.net is again in second place after Superpages.com. Magicyellow.com is nowhere for “attorney” but seems to be doing well for “lawyer”. The rest are more or less in similar positions as in the previous test.

IYP Rankings Test 4: Denver Suburbs Doctor

I noted a comment made by Chris Silver Smith on the post referenced at the start of this post:

While Superpages.com is nationwide, they’re not the dominant printed directory provider in every market, and the websites of the dominant provider often have higher traffic levels than other sites for that area. For instance, I’ve seen a number of stats showing that Dex directories (owned by R.H. Donnelley) dominate online yellow pages market share for cities in Colorado where their print directories are dominant.

So I found a list of 92 neighbourhoods in Denver, CO and chose a very local service provider that I’d expect to find in each residential area for sure – doctors. This would give me a feel for the depth of coverage within a major metro.

Boy oh boy. Superpages isn’t dominant here but CitySearch and YellowBook are.

Not Tested

I did not test rankings in Yahoo and Bing. I lie. I started to check the keyphrases across all three engines but IBP kept failing, but it was fine with Google on its own. Something to pass on to the vendor.

Although I have the data, I didn’t have the inclination to test the reverse, namely, for a given locality, which IYPs rank high, or rank at all? For example, not one of the IYPs rank in the top 10 for Birmingham AL divorce attorney, Burbank CA divorce attorney and 49 other localities. Yellowpages.latimes.com ranked high for the Burbank entry, but it wasn’t in my list of IYPs. In this niche, law firms and verticals have the top spots.

It’s well and good to see which IYPs rank high in Google, but do they have market share in the same proportions? I don’t have access to Hitwise USA stats, so compete.com will have to do.

Click the image above to see a larger version.

The fifth site here is IAF.net. According to this tool, Citysearch.com (green line) is declining in visits and Yelp.com (orange line) has just caught up. Yahoo Local (red line) is climbing, while Superpages is slightly declining – it’s the blue line.

Why some rank high

Across my limited testing (and Andrew’s analysis), superpages.com does rank high consistently in the organic search results. Whatever magic Chris cooked up during his tenure there, it’s still working. Without probing too deep or giving away their secrets, here is what I see:

Lots of pages other than pure BPPs, for example, they have Amazon and eBay content. More pages for internal links and for bringing in long-tail searches.
City guides – each locality page brings in more visits.
Coupons and deals – good for repeat traffic.
Info-rich BPPs.
Good use of nofollows.

Why some rankings suck don’t do well

I’m not naming names, but some of the IYPs not ranking well (or at all) show some of the following shortcomings:

The SEO shortcomings are known, and the solutions are scheduled to be implemented soon.
Unusual use of nofollows – blocking a spider from your content isn’t a good idea.
Explicit blocking of spiders from your content via robots.txt – see above.
No browsable listings (or I missed it) – just a search box.
No sitemap.xml – large sites with a lot of movement need it so that Google can pick up changes quickly.
Addresses and/or phone numbers that could appear in a Google SERP – means fewer people clicking through to you if they only needed the phone number.
Failing to take advantage of HTML elements such as an H1 – the H1 element is less important than having a heading of some kind.

Conclusion

My conclusion is that there isn’t a simple way to rank the US IYPs unless one could check every keyphrase for every heading across every locality. Google doesn’t like the use of automated ranking checkers and the sheer number of possible keyphrases makes this an unrealistic project.

For example, IAF.net is last in Andrew’s list but in my limited testing it is in second spot within a niche. Perhaps IAF concentrates on selling to the legal category. Too many unknowns for my liking.

From the IYP’s viewpoint, there’s not much point ranking well in headings where it’s difficult to sell a paid listing. They know their valuable headings and they’re unlikely to tell others, but they won’t be identical.

What is certain is that consumers will use Google and other engines (that’s going to be just Bing soon), so it is imperative for IYP business profile pages to appear in those search results. Getting the Google user to click through to the IYP is the goal, for this reinforces the value message. Will they recall whether they found the advertiser “in Google” or “in the Yellow Pages”? There’s a little challenge.

How will you use Windows 7 in real life?

9 August 2009

Ash Nallawalla

Windows 7 1 Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I played with the Microsoft Windows 7 beta and I am comfortable enough to make the switch from Windows XP Pro. The RTM is out and I am lucky enough to get a copy.

36 hours later I am still downloading Win 7 from the Asia server at about 35 KBit/s on a 1500/256 ADSL connection. 3 hours left to complete. Never mind.

In the meantime, I am thinking about whether I can risk switching from Win XP to Win7 as my primary OS.

Are any of you ready to do that? If you are, how are you addressing:

Antivirus, e.g. Norton, AVG (a lot of people use free ones)
Image backups e.g. Acronis
VoIP/SIP apps e.g. Skype, X-Lite
Mobile phone apps e.g. Nokia Suite
Twitter apps

I appreciate that the answer is “it depends on whether a particular app has been updated for Vista/Win7” but I am talking about the ones you need to work immediately, e.g. Outlook sync, AV and backups.

Also note – by “you” and “I”, I am really thinking about the early adopters in October – the ones who don’t have MSDN/TechNet or journalist connections, or are not particularly loyal to one vendor.

My initial approach will be to install Windows 7 on a separate drive and add my current applications to it. I know the older apps will probably not work and that the brand name apps might get a free update or not work at all. But I am curious to see if all the little freeware apps I have collected will still work.

How are you planning to make the move to Windows 7?