Amazon Visual Yellow Pages

Amazon’s new search engine A9 has come out with a innovative addition today, a visual yellow pages. If you live in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Chicago, New York City, Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, or the San Francisco and the Bay Area, you’ll get the full monty, otherwise you just get the data without the eye candy.

Here’s the how it works, you tell it what you are looking for like say PIZZA, it will show you pizza parlors that are all around you. To see the full effect you can change the city to “New York, NY”, and if the pizza parlor has a picture you’ll see it. This has people in the search community pretty excited:

Chris Sherman of Search Engine Watch had this to say:

A9’s entry into the online yellow pages space is sure to quicken both the pace of development and the competitive jostling among all of the players in both online yellow pages and local search listings. For something that was rolled out so quickly, it’s already an impressive and useful service that is bound to improve rapidly.

This is a clear show over the bow of Yahoo, which rolled out enhanced business listings for Yahoo Local last year. Yahoo charges $9.95 per month for enhanced listings.

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Kim Peterson of the Seattle Times points this out:

In some cases, the photographs aren’t completely precise. Amazon encourages users to find better pictures and allows businesses to submit their own photographs. Users can also post reviews of businesses in the same way they can review books on Amazon’s main site.

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John Battelle of Business 2.0 thought about how to monetize the project:

A9’s Yellow Pages have all the bells and whistles of Amazon — reviews, Listmania, etc. — the very architecture of participation. And business owners are invited to make their listings better, the first step toward selling premium listings

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So by now you’re probably wondering hey how’d they do that? They put camera’s on top SUV’s equipped with GPS devices, and paid people to drive up and down the streets (See A9 on How we did it). Now if you want you can even pan up and down the street, sort of like virtual people watching.

One of the most interesting features to watch develop will be the phone call feature. If you go to a detailed view of a location, click on the phone number. This will launch a pop up window that initiates a call between you and the business.

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