yellow pages in oz

In aussie, and a little while ago, someone at yellow pages told me they paid a chunk of cash to google and that yellow pages would start getting better serp presence as a result. Yeah, right. As if google would sell-out on the aussies and make their search engine crappy again. We had this problem a few years back with many other types of useless directories hogging the returned serps but they finally fixed it.

Or did they?

Let's look at this mentality at work here.

Yellow pages is a search engine [they wish], and when you search for a biz name in google oz, google thinks you want to search further search sites to find the biz you are looking for. Then why do aussies even bother to use google in the first place? Is google saying that if I have a business named "blah blah" that already has an official website called "blah blah", i need to go to yellow pages first who may or may not have a link to "blah blah's" official website.

I understand that a few aussies are not too bright, but most of us out here know that yellow pages has a website that we could use if we were chasing a directly listing and not the actual website.

But guess what? It seems to be true. I now have to dig past many useless directory listings again to find actual websites.

Now Bing is trying to be more sociable at the moment. And if google dont get their act together soon, I might start looking around for a search engine that gives me sensible data results. Now, I guess that Bing is mainly interested in stuffing their affiliated coffers but are willing to put this aside to get at the ad revenue cash. And google seems to be hell bent on personal profit over having a quality product that honestly became the envy of madison ave.

So where does this leave the small business? Time for someone to actually make another powerful search engine by the masses for the masses? It looks like we are getting to that point.

See, if you internet shoppers started to only shop at small business websites that offer good value and service, the billions going into the coffers of the unworthy would then [almost over nite] be spread out in a town near you. And local business owners are more sane that the organizations that hide unspent profits behind foundations and jobs and cash would again begin to flow in the western world.