Apptus technology behind successful relaunch of UK's local search engine Yell.com

In April 2009, Yell.com, the UK’s local search engine for UK business listings, relaunched with a new design and a wealth of new relevant content to help consumers find and select the best local and national businesses for their needs. “Apptus has provided an integral element of our newly relaunched website, enabling the extraction of key information about advertisers’ businesses and services from their own websites for display on Yell.com,” says Matthew Bottomley, Yell.com’s director of new media product marketing. Key to the expansion of information about businesses displayed on Yell.com, has been a project in partnership with Apptus Technologies AB. Apptus worked with Yell.com to develop tools to allow the regular extraction of structured information from the websites of more than 100,000 businesses in the UK. This included extracting introductory paragraphs, images, keywords and phrases relevant to the business, and all the necessary work for a successful launch was completed within a three month development window. “This provides consumers with further valuable data about advertisers and is part of wider developments designed to help them make better decisions on selecting a business or service. Apptus has provided excellent, timely support to deliver a key project,” says Matthew Bottomley. The content enrichment software enables Yell.com to feed the search layer with additional search attributes, reduce no-hits by providing relevant keywords specific to each advertiser and create enriched profile pages with comprehensive business information. “Using these tools the sales force has the capability of visualizing enriched profile pages for each advertiser and better preparing the sales call through “easy-to-grasp” intelligence about the advertiser’s products or brands, online sales capabilities and suitable classifications.” says Michael Mokhberi, CEO at Apptus. So successful was the launch that Yell.com has now committed to expanding the programme to include the extraction of further information from business websites.