UK’s local search engine YELL.COM chooses Apptus’ technology for future development

Yell.com, the UK’s local search engine, has selected Apptus Technologies to develop tailored software to further broaden its search capability and support future site development. Search specialist Apptus Technologies was chosen on the basis of its track record and expertise in developing crawling, searching and text analytical software.
A focus will be analysing the very large volumes of information from the adverts and web sites of Yell.com’s customers. Yell.com has around seven million users* and more than 200,000** paying advertisers.

- Success in the local search market demands a skillful selection from a range of search engine related technologies. Apptus will be able to help us extend our capabilities through its expertise in text mining, thesaurus development, automated classification and entity extraction - says Steve Maller, Chief Technology Officer at Yell.com.

Apptus, specialists in search and database management, has extensive knowledge of the specific needs of online classified directories. Since its founding in 2000, Apptus has positioned itself as the leader in the e-directory sector in the Nordic countries, where the leaders within the segment are relying on technology from Apptus to manage, search, share and distribute their data in traffic and transaction intensive information systems.

- We are very proud to have Yell.com as a customer, says Michael Atlevi, Chief Executive Officer at Apptus. This is proof of our long term strategy to build a viable solution for the global e-directory market. During the last five years we’ve been investing heavily in this segment and so far we have covered the Nordic countries. Now we are expanding further afield into new markets.

Apptus' Theca platform, which will lie at the heart of its work for Yell.com, enables vast amounts of data to be retrieved from various sources, cleansed, transformed, categorised and indexed, all within the same platform. By using optimised data structures and specialised search algorithms, Theca® optimizes usage of hardware and pushes the functionality limits beyond what was previously possible within traditional data management platforms.

* The number of unique users who visited Yell.com once or more often during September 2007, as reported in Yell Group’s half year results on November 6 2007, was 6.7 million. Unique users are measured according to independently established industry standard measures.
** The number of searchable advertisers at the end of September 2007, as reported in Yell Group’s half year results on November 6 2007, was 208,000.