Precise electronic local search enriches Yellow Pages experience

MANILA, Philippines - “The Yellow Pages brand is about bringing a business — no matter the size of its marketing budget — in touch with ready buyers.”

With that statement, Ricardo Bautista, president of Directories Philippines Corp. (DPC), made it clear that the Yellow Pages is more than just a commercial directory service.

“In addition to making the service accessible in print, electronic and mobile platforms, we have introduced a whole slew of value-added services to make the commercial search experience more convenient and fulfilling,” he said.

At the cutting edge of this massive brand re-orientation is the Electronic Yellow Pages (EYP, www.eyp.ph), the premiere local online search authority in the Philippines.

EYP focuses on local search because it is the niche that powerful global search engines cannot serve effectively. In fact, Google has forged a partnership (through Google Maps) with EYP precisely to fill this gap in the Internet giant’s massive reach. Yahoo is also exploring a deal with EYP.

“Both Google and Yahoo have realized that not all the information being searched is already online,” said Doji Lopez, DPC vice president for new media. “If a business has no Internet presence, it will not be found.”

Second, global search engines tend to yield very broad results on the basis of key words. They do not determine if users are looking for a business, a person or an article.

“Users may get close search matches but they always have to filter the precise results from the gibberish,” Lopez said. “Also, the big search engines may not be the best tools from the perspective of someone who is looking to buy something.”

Over the years, EYP has raised the granularity of search results to the most specific business, product, and location possible.

“Local search has to do with local fulfillment and at EYP, we guarantee that information is always organized relative to a specific location,” Lopez said.

“EYP shortens the distance between the advertisers/sellers and the ready buyers,” he added.

Because EYP provides ready buyers with highly relevant and specific search results, local enterprises can reach exactly the customers who are looking for their kind of products or services, precisely where their stores are located.

EYP goes a step further in enabling these local enterprises to be found with its precise vicinity maps, which can be accessed with just a mouse click.

EYP lists more than 200,000 local enterprises from all over the country.