An entertaining presenter, Graeme Seaton from Yell.com delivered an interesting combination presentation and demonstration entitled “Matching Businesses with Consumers at the Leading Directory Service in the UK”. He provided the audience with an overview of how his firm discovered MarkLogic Server, how they ended up selecting the company to provide their underlying content framework, and showed the audience how the service works.
[Note: This is a very new implementation of MarkLogic and the company is getting ready to launch a new update soon that will take better advantage of geo-location-based data.]
“We’re all about saving time and preventing our customers from trying to think too much,” Seaton said. “Our aim is to be helpful.”
Yell.com is part search engine, part contextual content matching engine. It’s also a resource for research that leverages multiple content types and aggregates and displays them for the user based on the data from their search query and other information (like postal code). Results provide the usual Google-like listings, but also includes suggested — and additional useful services — including the ability for the user to telephone the listing they retrieve from their search toll-free, from their web browser.
The presentation explored the technical and business aspects of the Yell.com service and covered briefly how Yell.com services advertisers (including some interesting reporting features).
Look for dramatic changes in the search arena. It’s a very exciting arena that will have major impacts on the way people use the internet and on how devices that rely on the web may be able to assist us in the future.
