Natural Search Blog » Design

Amazon Acquires Social Media Book Site Shelfari

Chris — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:00:19 +0000

Amazon has acquired Shelfari, a site where people can share their reading lists, review books, and find books to read. Others have noted that Shelfari sports a cool user interface, but I note that there are quite a few book list sharing sites out there like it, such as LibraryThing, aNobii, and GoodReads.

I’m not sure that the UI alone is really enough to differentiate Shelfari from the pack, particularly if Amazon over-commercializes it. I think if it tries to push book sales too much, it might easily disaffect the usership and they could easily swing over to one of the handful of competitors.

Amazon has been extremely adept at seeing the potential value of social media, and have been bullish at integrating it. Yet, some of their aggressiveness at pushing their commercial products has seriously degraded the social media value of some of these initiatives. I have more commentary on specifics of this which I’ll share later.

A number of large internet companies have gone the acquisition route to try to combine the benefits of social media into their existing content and commercial sites. Thus far, it’s not entirely clear that this strategy works longterm, because the commercialization of social media sites tends to irritate users and makes their users take a cynical view about their involvement. A notable exception to this is Flickr, a photo sharing site which Yahoo! acquired and which continues to grow in popularity and usage.

Google also sees the potential of book reviews and sharing of reading lists — I recently blogged about how Google added shared reading lists for politicians and pundits.

LinkedIn Beta Tests New Homepage Layout

Chris — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:53:48 +0000

So, I’m at the SMX West conference tonight, hopping around networking with people and every so often updating my Flickr pix or sending work emails when I noticed that LinkedIn is apparently beta-testing a new homepage layout on me. Check out the screengrab of what I see now when I login to LinkedIn:

(click to enlarge)

So, they want feedback on their new design, so I’ll give it here.

I’d assume when they moved some of the header area navigation down to form the left sidebar, that this should open up room for the rest of the body content on the page to come up closer to the top of the window. As you can see from my screen-grab, this isn’t what happened.

Some of the general features they’ve been adding recently have pushed down what I considered to be their core content — the main reason I use their site — to far lower on the page and “below the fold”.

Pushing Inbox content to the front page and the news items are pushing my Network updates way down on the page. The network updates are one of the main reasons I’m coming here, so this is irritating. News I already get from elsewhere, and the emails are all going into my regular email in-box, so why are these presented as though they’re the main content of LinkedIn when I arrive on their homepage? Maybe email should flow to the top if you have opted not to have the notes mailed to your email address.

The little green checkmark and message box seem to take up more prime real estate, pushing everything down.

Why wouldn’t Answers also be found in the little left sidebar?

Aside from the bad prioritization that pushes their unique content to the lower part of the page, the colors and layout seem otherwise fine.

I’d note that the tabbed top of the old design seems actually preferable to this, because the main content navigation seems pushed down on the page for some of the top sections. Bringing that stuff down lower on the page seems to squeeze other content, making everything scroll longer than necessary.

Bottom line: I mainly use LinkedIn to research info about people, to network with people, and to keep updated info about my professional contacts. So, other stuff is of lesser importance to me, and should be made less prominent on my LinkedIn homepage. Don’t make me scroll if I don’t have to!

Origins of the Google Logo

Chris — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:25:11 +0000

Wired today has an article on the preliminary Google logo designs - something that aspiring internet commercial artists should check out.

One of the designs is obviously referencing Op Art to give a modernistic feel. Another treats the second “O” as a sort of loose metaphor for the web or to symbolize multidimensionality. Yet another uses a magnifying glass for the second “O” — a much more literal representation for a search engine which we used to see really frequently in the earlier years of the internet (remember stuff like the old WebCrawler logo?).

I think the version they ultimately used is the best/strongest one, even though I think it likely owes something to eBay’s playful/colorful logo.

The original designer of the Google logo was Ruth Kedar, an assistant professor at Stanford at the time. She noted, “I had no idea at the time that Google would become as ubiquitous as it is today, or that their success would be of such magnitude”.

Ubiquitous it is indeed. As I noted two months ago, the frequency of use of the Google logo and its familiarity within the popular culture have been growing to the point of actually being a little bit of a danger from the viewpoint of being able to protect the marks as intellectual property.

The Google name is on everyone’s lips.
Copyright Silver Smith 2007. All rights reserved.

Zvents Launches Federated Local Search

Chris — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:09:11 +0000

Zvents announced today their launch of a new, blended search results page for local content. Now, when you do searches on their site, they’ll bring back results for various businesses, events, performances, movies, store sales and more in your local area. Here’s a screengrab of the newly-blended results page:

(click to enlarge)

You can see little icons to the right side of the listings which indicate what type of listing each result represents.

Google’s move to Universal Search in the past year and their recent move to expand out the local one-box results from a few listings to ten would indicate that user-testing is showing blended results to be a very popular item among search engine users. Zvents move to provide blended results makes them a very strong contender as a provider for local search and content technology. As Greg Sterling mentions, Zvents is a provider for syndicated content for third parties like newspapers, and they’re clearly positioning themselves as a potential backend for other local content sites wanting to have functionality similar to Google’s.

From trying out Zvents’ new functionality, I think the overall concept is strong although it may require further refinement on the user-experience end. The dilemma for the site is that users who are requesting a particular type of content will want to be able to easily absorb the specific results they’re looking for. I did a search for “concerts” in San Francisco, and as a user I’d be less impressed when restaurants and venues are returned, if there aren’t concerts happening at them.

It’s true that a user looking for a concert or other event might also then be interested in restaurants in the immediate area or other cool things to see and do, but the perception of relevance for what the user requests must be very high, first and foremost. It may be that Zvents will need to rearrange their results listings in order to improve this perception — have precisely what’s requested be front and center while ancillary content be moved to sidebars or below the main listings. Blended results are dependent upon the context of the search in order to be perceived as relevant.

Still, much of search blending and local search results presentation is still in a very experimental stage throughout the industry, and Zvents’ moves are making them strong contenders for the long haul. Their plans to launch an open-source data storage and processing platform named Hypertable on January 31st, is starting to attract a lot of attention from the IT developer demographic. The system appears to be intended to provide Google-like powers to other people, since it’s a very similar concept to Google’s own BigTable, which is currently only used internally by Googlers. Hypertable will allow distributed processing and storage of both structured and unstructured data, apparently at excellent performance rates.

The introduction of the federated search / blended results may make Zvents’ content more attractive to developers who could use the Zvents API to increase their content’s distribution. Developments are well worth watching here.

[BTW - I'll be speaking on the subject of Local Search & Blended Results at the upcoming SMX West conference in Santa Clara.]

Organic Search Marketing in 2008: Predictions

Chris — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:44:20 +0000

If you’re even the slightest bit aware of what’s been going on in organic search marketing, you couldn’t help but know that Google made a number of changes during 2007 which impacted the natural search marketing programs for many webmasters. So here’s my little post predicting where I see the trends pointing and what we can expect in 2008 and beyond…

One really cool blog post I saw recently was by Brett Borders, covering the “7 SEO Techniques That Google Smashed in 2007“. While at least one of the items he listed wasn’t a technique (Universal Search was undoubtedly a major paradigm shift in Google SERP layouts, though not an optimization technique), the list overall covered most of the big changes we know of in the past year which impacted how experts modify their programs to get found more easily.

The one trend we can consistently see driving change at the Google end is a desire to render SEO experts irrelevant to some degree. In an ideal world from Google’s viewpoint, webmasters would build sites for their endusers, and search engines would spider and rank their pages equally well in all cases and there would be no need for the SEO “middlemen”. Google further desires to somewhat devalue some of the signals or methods that optimization experts have used to artificially influence rankings — Google’s moves to negate the value of link purchasing and other linking schemes is direct evidence.

While Google has worked in an increasingly friendly manner with many SEOs, they have simultaneously been providing tutorial-like training and assistance to universities and government agencies to improve the indexation and availability of the content provided by those organizations. In some cases, they’re apparently also specifically adapting their spidering rules to overcome traditional barriers found in those types of sites as well — moves which render the need for SEO expertise fairly unnecessary.

Just as I earlier predicted back in 2006, Googleâ€™s aggressive moves to reduce the ability of people to artificially influence rankings is continuing to make inroads against classic SEO methods. Usability really is beginning to eclipse SEO in some ways.

If you’ve kept up with developments at the Google end, you’re aware of how they’ve been building a very hybridized approach for incorporating human signals into their ranking methods along with the “purely algorithmic” methods they’ve been using. (See Matt Cutt’s post on The role of humans in Google search.)

Google’s small armies of human quality evaluators are trained in deciding which pages are more relevant for various example searches, but there are other factors that are starting to influence rankings more than before, such as â€œengaging-nessâ€ â€” if a human evaluator is browsing rapidly through the first few pages of results in Google for a keyword search, theyâ€™re rating which pages they think are the best/worst in the set. Simple designs which are attractive and appealing are going to win out more and more.

“Popularity” is also a quantitative factor which appears to be poised as a major signal that search engines could be expected to use more and more considering how easy it would be to use data from social media sites as a contributive ranking value. The number of votes or bookmarks for a site or page through social media sites are the sorts of things which the search engines could be reasonably expected to use, which is one of the reasons why more search marketers are recommending social media as a component to a healthy internet program.

There are some pieces of classic SEO which continue to work well and which I think we can continue to expect to leverage effectively during 2008 — items like Titles, H1s, and on-page text content. Jill Whalen just did a great retrospective look comparing the factors that she recommends currently with what she used to recommend from seven years back, and the parallels were reassuring. Jill sums up with just what I’m getting at too, though: design a great website, and that really helps to propel your search marketing success.

So, for 2008 and beyond, look for these trends to continue:

Usability may grow to be an even more major component of search marketing. If you haven’t already, familiarize yourself with usability considerations by reading blogs and articles by such experts as Jakob Nielsen (did you realize he used to be a member of Google’s advisory board?).

Attractiveness may increasingly become a subtle factor in your rankings, so familiarize yourself with the basic concepts of good interface design by reading the classic manifestos of web design such as Lynda Weinman’s book on Creative HTML Design 2 and others. (Note: “coolness” is not necessarily the same as good, simple and attractive design. “Coolness” can often be a barrier to usability and when user interfaces are designed away from easiness, such features often annoy endusers.)

Simplicity coupled with good, UNIQUE content frequently will win out over time.

Social Media’s impact on search marketing may continue to grow over time. Integrate as possible with the Web 2.0 properties which have high usage numbers coupled with good policing against spam. Like del.icio.us, more of these seem likely to get eventually absorbed into the major search engines.

Continue using white-hat, squeaky-clean SEO methods, and also incorporate concepts of user-centered design, attractiveness, simplicity, while leveraging popularity drivers in social media and you can’t go wrong in 2008! May your search marketing result in increasing traffic and conversions!

Google Testing New Local OneBox Layout & Addresses in PPC Ads

Chris — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:28:17 +0000

Greg Sterling this morning mentioned that Google is apparently experimenting with allowing full street addresses to appear below the URLs in PPC ads.

Even more interesting, this thread at Webmasterworld now reports seeing a new layout of local listings within Google SERPs — their screengrab shows the Google Maps onebox results on the right side of the page, apparently above the Sponsored Links ads.

Is this just usual UI/Usability testing, or could this segue into more unrest for the local SERPs?

Superpages.com Adds More User-Generated Content to the Local Mix

Chris — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:29:39 +0000

About a week ago, Idearc announced that Superpages.com had introduced more user-content features.

(click to enlarge)

Previously, the primary component of user content on the site was limited to user ratings and reviews associated with business listings.

Some of the new features this recent upgrade added include allowing all users to enhance basic biz profile information, uploading pictures of organizations, wiki-like biz listing “blog” features which could allow simplistic blogging by businesses and/or could be used as a consumer comment or Q/A zone for each business since any user could submit info to them.

Of all the top online yellow pages and local search sites, I believe that Superpages may now have the distinction of having the greatest variety of Web 2.0 features. Out of Local.com, DexKnows, Yellowpages.com, YellowBook, Citysearch, and Google Maps — none of them have photos + ratings/reviews + “blogs” + user-provided profile data. Only Yahoo Local really approaches this number of user-content features, I believe. Out of all of the top IYP and local search sites, only Yahoo Local and Superpages openly invite any users to supply photos for locations — Google Maps only allows business owners and content partners to supply photos.

Now, I can see that they may still be working a few of the kinks out in these new services, and the display of this new content seems a little bit siloed or distanced from the business’s profile page, requiring a click to see it. But, I expect these are things which will evolve and expand as they get more content added in. There’s always something of a chicken-or-egg dilemma when adding new content like this to sites — stuff can look a little sad when there’s little content, but it’s hard to get content without making the features really visually apparent.

But, critique of the implementation aside, Superpages appears to be keeping a ahead of the game by striving to differentiate themselves from the competition in terms of these new user features, along with the robust data sources and diverse ad products they already had.

You may recall that Superpages recently brought their video ads out of beta release, and they also acquired Switchboard.com and announced plans to deploy local content through Microsoft Windows Live Messenger via a partnership with Multiplied Media. Just before that, Idearc acquired the LocalSearch.com domain name along with some portion of ownership of AmericanTowns.com (a company which has substantial local information sites and content).

There’s an arms race that’s been going on for quite some time in the local space wherein the yellow pages directory sites and local search engines have all been seeking to outpace each other by ramping up on product features and richness of data. With the recent flurry of multiple announcements and deployments of new functionality and distribution channels, you can see that Superpages is aggressively working to outpace the competition and make it challenging for others to match their suite of features. The programming for such stuff is relatively easy in some cases, but the logistics involved in managing quality issues can be expensive — you don’t want people adding malicious or obscene images to businesses, so it requires human auditing to keep the quality up.

I think these recent changes may begin to transform their info pages from being the traditional business profiles into something more like dynamic information clusters around businesses.

The strategy could be worth it in terms of driving user loyalty and in helping to differentiate from the competition. The interest and adoption of sites like Yelp.com have demonstrated that user communities can effectively be built around directory information sites, so user-generated content could be the next frontier for IYP, if it can be done in an affordable manner that doesn’t degrade quality.

Obviously, a prime motivating factor behind all this pumping of investment capital into Superpages.com is Idearc’s expectation that revenues on the legacy print side of the house may continue to decline. In the recent figures from Idearc’s third-quarter financials, Idearc’s stock took a heavy beating, in part because of a 3% fall in print revenue. Lehman Brothers analyst Anthony DiClemente stated:

“I think the concern from investors is that you are seeing the transition of the business to electronic from print faster than expected.”

Hmmm…. it sounds a bit like my theory that Google Trends could be indicating a pretty fast slump for traditional yellow pages usage might actually have some basis. But, I digress.

Idearc’s not taking the paradigm shift laying down — the cagey adoption of Web 2.0 hallmarks on top of the solidly-performing product will help them keep ahead in the local search game.

(Disclosure: I used to work for Idearc Superpages.com and you can reasonably consider that I might still hold stock and/or options from them. Despite this, I do try to write objectively about them and the local search industry in general. Heck, I’ve even been accused recently of being biased against yellow pages for stuff I write. Even so, I just want to state for the record that this article is an opinion piece by me with no intention of influencing stock prices, and you shouldn’t be basing stock purchase decisions on me anyway. After all, I’m *still* stinging a bit from my stock losses suffered during the dot-com bust!)

Superpages Launches New Redesign

Chris — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 20:40:57 +0000

I noticed that my old company, Idearc Media, just launched a major new redesign today for their primary web property, Superpages.com:

Read on for a few of my comments about it.

Some of my teams worked really heavily on the transition to the new design, and I’m really impressed by their work!

I’m also very, very pleased with the changes introduced by the redesign, which I think are pretty effective. The new design introduces more local content directly onto the site’s homepage. Top-rated local businesses are displayed, local WiFi hotspots, and local weather, for instance.

While I was at Superpages, I used to be a big proponent of the various types of city/locality content like this. The City Pages section used to be under my purview - and I’d actually introduced contextual links on the homepage associated with users’ cities a few years ago (Attractions, Events, & Weather), though it was done in a much less visible way, and those contextual integrations got subsumed under some other subsequent redesign. The weather data they’re currently using also came out of one of my pet R&D projects wherein we built our own in-house weather data presentation system, based off of a number of government data sources.

This new design also introduces silhouettes of the skylines of major cities on the homepage as pretty treatment to lend feeling to the “we know local” nature of the site.

In order to view the local info and silhouettes on the homepage, you have to have used the site at some point in the past so that the system can remember your last-searched-locality. Then, when you return to the homepage the next time, it’ll display content from that location. Logging into the personalization isn’t required for the treatment. To see how it works, perform a search for “Restaurants” or something in “Seattle, WA” - a city which has a particularly cool and identifiable skyline silhouette.

Additional redesign elements include a completely revamped Listings page. The page now sports a default map image of the results for a business search, and a much “cleaner” look-and-feel to the layout. There’s also a big paradigm shift that’s happened in these results pages — previously, the All Listings section of the page (below the Sponsored Results) was listed by default in alphabetical order. These results are now displayed in proximity order — in order of businesses closest to the location specified by the searcher.

This paradigm shift shows the next evolutionary level of yellow pages, making the listings content much closer in similarity to the “local search” results presentation introduced by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

While you can say that Superpages is imitating the major search engines, there’s a real chicken-and-egg thing at play with that, because Superpages was the first major site to come out with the map-o-centric “local search” results, years and years back. I know, because I was in charge of the project on the tech side of the house. We called that “Map-Based Search”, and it was clear that Google and Yahoo both imitated that interface when they first deployed their “local search” interfaces. So, who’s imitating who is more than a bit blurry at this point.

Most industry wags and industry observers would tell you that “yellow pages” and “local search” are evolving, and they’ll likely ultimately end up meeting somewhere in the middle. I’d say that this change brings Superpages up to being one of the sites that’s closest to the ideal middle-ground of any site out there. And, it certainly places Superpages another step above the other IYPs out there.

Of course, I’m arguably a little bit biased as a former long-time employee (and still a current stockholder), so you’ll need to decide for yourself!

SEO May Be Eclipsed by User-Centered Design

Chris — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 06:51:50 +0000

I’ve been seeing indications that Google has shifted their weighting of the ~200 various signals they use in their ranking soup over the past couple of years. It used to be that PageRank along with the number of keyword references on a page were some of the strongest signals used for what page comes up highest in the search results, but I’ve seen more and more cases where PageRank and keyword density seem relatively weaker than they once were. I see a lot of reasons to believe that quality ratings have become weighted more heavily for rankings, particularly among more popular search keywords. Google continues to lead the pack in the search marketplace, so their evolution will likely influence their competitors in similar directions, too.

So, what is my evidence that Google’s development of Quality criteria is becoming more influential in their rankings than PageRank and other classic optimization elements? Read on and I’ll explain. Nearly since inception, Google has focused strongly upon Usability and User Experience to create a service that Marissa Mayer (Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience), has referred to as a useful tool which they made approachable/accessible by applying a usable interface on top of it. We know that they haven’t stopped working to improve the user experience on their site, but are following the practice of continuous quality improvement in this area. Way back in 2002 Mayer reported:

“we’re user testing almost every week. We’ll do a site-wide test once a month or so, with some tasks, but more free-form, just to see where people go, where they encounter problems. The other three weeks of the month, we test specific features.”

You can safely bet that they’ve increased or evolved their user testing methods here in 2006. Google has been hiring Quality Evaluators, Quality Raters, and Usability Researchers at an astonishing pace during this past year.

In 2005, Henk van Ess reported various details of instructions that Google provides to their human evaluators to use in rating the quality of pages appearing in their search results. His first two entries on the subject were eye-openers for many:

“Google’s Secret Lab, Prelude”
“Google’s Human Quality Evaluation: How To Spot Offensive Sites & Google’s Whitelist“

Google, Yahoo, and MSN all use some human evaluators in their ongoing fight against spam sites. John Battelle relates in his book, The Search (2005) pg 240, that Yahoo exercises editorial discretion to customize some types of content for various keyword SERPs. He also wrote, “Google sees the problem as one that can be solved mainly through technology — clever algorithms and sheer computational horsepower will prevail. Humans enter the search picture only when algorithms fail — and then only grudgingly.” Yet, Google more than any other has apparently expanded the role of humans in evaluating their search results, and their role has gone beyond just red-flagging spam sites. They are apparently rating pages based upon quality and appropriateness for the search keyword as well.

Wall Street reports that Google recently changed their internal focus from deploying more products to improving core services and making them integrate better with each other. You can read the subtext here: improve the quality of their core products, and their central product is search.
They’ve also turned attention to the quality of pages that the ads running on their network are linked. Jeremy Shoemacher (aka “Shoemoney”) and others have only just reported that Google is now rating the Quality of AdWords landing pages. (Read the AdWords blog entry on the subject, too.) This is another indicator of their dedication to the quality of user experience — they’re essentially penalizing their advertisers who have lower quality.

So, there’s plenty of evidence that Google is now obsessed with taking the quality of their SERPs to the next level by testing to see if the pages appearing in results are apropos, and then altering the rankings of the results to better target user’s desires/intentions. How do they do this?

You can read the documents exposed on Henk’s Search Bistro site for specifics, but I can summarize a bit:

Their evaluators are presented the search results page for a keyword. They must check out each of the top pages appearing for that keyword term, and vote on whether the page is good quality or not.

If the page content seems inappropriate for the keyword, it will get a bad rating for that keyword.

They particularly will give a bad rating to pages which are primarily composed of ads.

They particularly will give a bad rating to pages which are primarily composed of affiliate links, unless the site has included some significant value-add content in conjunction with the affiliate content.

Google desires that the pages linked in their SERP for a keyword should not all contain identical content, because they believe this would be a bad user-experience. So, syndicated content appearing on many multiple sites may only rank well for the originator or most-authoritative site, according to how their algorithms identify authoritativeness.

Pages which are hiding keywords or using misleading TITLE text or META descriptions may expect to be negatively rated. (I recently blogged in detail about the new emphasis on META descriptions.)

It’s quite possible that Google could be using a process like TrustRank wherein their evaluators may rate a sample set of pages from a large site, and then they could use the resulting average trust rating across all the site’s pages. (Various of us have fantasized that the mysterious “IndyRank” element that was accidentally exposed in a Google error page could be referring to a human rating value for a site or page.) If this is occuring, your entire site could suffer if you have one section that has low quality according to their scoring guidelines.

The end result of these trends is that the practice of SEO is transforming from a stew of technical wizardry into applying methods for good user-centered design. Sure, we’ll still need to insure that pages will include actual text content, and expose database content through crawlable links. But tech tricks for increasing the relevancy of a page for a keyword may not be sustainable over the longterm.

Stephan Spencer and others have said that the SEO industry might not even survive long-term, because SEO is parasitically dependent upon the failures of designers to build usable websites, and the failures of search engines to perfectly rank pages for their subject matter.

I’ve attended Search Engine Strategies conferences for many years, and I’ve heard engineers from each of the major engines recommend that webmasters concentrate on usability more than on how to game the SERPs, but Google appears to be actually quantifying usability. If they master this, it really could be the end of the SEO industry. The other SEs will just play follow-the-leader when this happens.

Are you a SEO professional who is ready for this sea change? Are you educated about usability testing and user-centered design? One book I recommend on the subject is Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think”.

Verizon to Spin-Off Verizon Information Services & Superpages.com

Chris — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:57:02 +0000

Verizon’s official announcement regarding the spin-off plans came out just a short while ago. Verizon Communications Corp. is spinning off the business unit that I work for, Verizon Information Services, and its local information website, Superpages.com.

The new company’s name is “Idearc Inc.”, and it will operate under marks of “Idearc” and “Idearc Media“:

I’m not allowed to make any sort of forward-sounding business statements in relation to this until the spin-off is completed, due to the usual SEC rules. This is one of the common-sense limits one must place on one’s self, if one is an employee who happens to blog in one’s personal time! (Wow! That sounded inhuman and recursive, didn’t it!) While I am an employee of VIS, I’m not speaking here in any sort of official capacity for my company, and any interpretations I place here are completely my own viewpoint. Obviously, nothing I say should be used in making stock purchase/sale decisions!

I can repeat some of the things that were in this spin-off announcement press release, and in recent press releases. The announcement states that the green in the logo is a reference to our “industry-leading SuperPages.com service”. I leave it to you, the reader, whether to interpret this as an indication of how important the company considers the Superpages.com website…

comScore’s recent press release shows Superpages.com to be one of the top two yellow pages sites in terms of usage. Also, we recently issued a press release regarding our great traffic, and Robyn Rose, our VP of Marketing, said:

“There is a reason we continue to be the leading IYP… We creatively provide consumers and advertisers the tools they want and need to find each other and come together to do business.”

Hitwise also recently mentioned our prominence in terms of market share.

I can also say that I think the logo is really great, and nicely representive of who we have been, who we are, and where we’re going! I actually like it more than when they announced the Verizon name to us, way back when. “Idearc” sounds a lot friendlier than “Verizon”. I bet that the “feel” of this name and logo could potentially set our new corporate character. Names and logos can change psychological perceptions.

I enjoy working for Superpages — indeed, I’ve worked here since prior to us being part of Verizon. I started out working for GTE Directories Corporation about ten years ago, and I lingered through our merger with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon. It’s with a slight nostalgia that I’m now following Superpages as we leave the fold of the big, Verizon parent corporation.

I’ll probably post some opinions on the pros and cons of the spin-off, once it’s completed. I’m sure in the next few days all sorts of industry wags will weigh in on it, though, from every direction anyway!
I will be glad when all the divestment activities conclude — we have all sorts of rebranding activities going on, and the separation from various common Verizon Corp systems.