YellowBot: More of the same

4 Apr
2007

Just saw that another local search engine has been released: YellowBot.

And so another chapter in my ‘reviewing and criticizing local search sites’.

I will first send our attention to this: Yellowbot.com – Social Networking and Local Search. Why don’t we go over their feature-list:

Local Search – An obvious one. Dozens of sites for that
Advanced Search Filters – I see no ‘advanced search’ option. I’m going to chalk this up as buzzword sensation
Tagging – Been there, done that with iBegin ;)
Ratings and Reviews – The staple of all local sites
Recommendations – The only thing I saw was ‘recommended – yes or no’. Seems like simplified version of a review. Similar to our own ‘Favorites’
Business Details – Unless details are the basic name + address + category, I missed something.
Uploaded Pictures – Another staple
MyAccount Page – Again, another staple
Blog – I don’t see a way for users to blog, so I imagine this is the company blog. Old hat
Forum – Another staple (be it in the form of ‘Talk’ or ‘Community’ or even ‘Q&A’ – same thing)

Other things to nitpick:

  • When adding a review, a nice inline popup appears, and then a nasty redirect to the login page. Why even bother with that guys?
  • http://www.yellowbot.com/tags/food/El%20Paso%2C%20TX%2079922/page1.html is not a proper URL. You need to add url encoding
  • On the map page of this listing, what’s with the ‘Good to Know’? (plus you wrote it as ‘el Paso’ heh)
  • Your MapView is busted – no icons for above ’100′ it seems. It would be prudent to use the ‘bounding’ function in GoogleMaps so it auto-zooms in as close as it can

In your WebProNews interview, you said people do not get the connection between offline and online. In what ways are you guys making that connection better?

8 Responses to YellowBot: More of the same

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Ask Bjørn Hansen

April 4th, 2007 at 9:16 pm

Hi there,

Thanks for your feedback! I’ll try to get the favor returned with a review of ibegin over on my weblog. :-)

“Why even bother with that”? With what? The thickbox/”inline popup” or the login? The login is for obvious reasons – the “inline popup” is mostly because it’s a nicer experience when you initiate the review from the search grid page.

Showing the popup before sending you to the review page is, uh, not so clever indeed. I’ll get that logged as a bug, thanks!

“Url encoding” – Huh? That URL is encoded with the %20′s. Or did you mean replacing the space/%20 characters with _’s? That’s a good idea, thanks! :-)

“Good to know” – yeah, that’s fixed in the next version. Usually we do daily releases, but it’s held up right now waiting for a couple new things to get finished.

“Mapview auto-zooming”: Hah – if only it was that simple … Depending on how it’s used then doing the auto-zooming ends up being incredibly confusing (at least in our “hallway testing”). Oh, or did you just mean when you keep adding more results? Hmn, yeah – we need to look into that. We didn’t make the mapview search page the default for a reason. ;-)

Thanks again!

– ask

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Ask Bjørn Hansen

April 4th, 2007 at 9:17 pm

“el Paso” – oh yeah, that is really annoying. The code we use to capitalize the data likes to do it like that and we’ve never gotten around to fixing it. It also gets it wrong (for this use) when a place is called “la” something something.

– ask

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Ahmed

April 4th, 2007 at 10:05 pm

Finally – someone to be critical of me! :)

I’ll reply tomorrow – I’m off to get me some ice cream.

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emad

April 4th, 2007 at 10:08 pm

Hey, Ahmed.

Thanks for the feedback.

Let me chime on the bounds function. When you first search, the bounds function is used. When you decide to drag or paginate, you cannot simply reuse the boudning function because it is too jarring for the users…their center is thrown off, etc.

Good luck with iBegin!

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emad

April 4th, 2007 at 10:12 pm

P.S. you may want to fix your “ADD TAGS” button on iBegin before Ask reviews it. ;-)

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emad

April 5th, 2007 at 10:18 am

sorry…one more thing…advanced search exists. Here it is in the faq:
http://www.yellowbot.com/about/faq.html#search

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Ahmed

April 5th, 2007 at 10:28 am

In terms of the map – I get you when you talk about jarring experience. But if you keep it centered, figure out the ‘area’ you are covering, and calculate zoom-out level based on that, it should be fine. Still the same center point, just zoomed out.

Advanced search – interesting. Hiding it doesn’t help anyone – put an inline popup for that.

Add Tags on iBegin – oi?! Seems to work fine for me (just added a few)

*Mention on Greg Sterling’s blog about frontpage – it isn’t that it’s broken – it just looks a bit odd. The home icon is overlapping on the input box, and when you do click on it, ‘Close x’ definitely needs some padding to it.

Help/FAQ page – I looked at it, and press back superfast. It seems like too much text, not enough line-height, and not enough whitespace.

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Tom

February 16th, 2009 at 7:47 am

Yellowbot is a scam. It lists people’s personal information as “businesses”. They just scrape other site’s listings or have purchased spam lists or mailing lists. Nothing but a lame attempt to rip people off. They also don’t respond to any requests to have personal information removed from the site. Avoid this website.

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