YellowPages.com versus Folksonomy

YellowPages.com just does not cut it in today’s Web 2.0 world. They have completely missed out on the democratization/folksonomy cultures sweeping the Web. The folksonomy culture ensures that web pages get attention based on what other users think of the page; and not just on how much one is willing to pay to get attention for a page. Thus, folksonomy ensures the playing field is leveled between those with lots of money and those with lots of happy customers but low advertising budgets.

Let’s take an example: Go to YellowPages.com and type ‘restaurants’ for the Business Category, and ‘Fremont, CA’ for the location. At the top of the page one gets a listing for Panda Express, and at the bottom one gets a listing for ‘Wok City Diner’. An average web user will chose from the first or second listing for Chinese food (if that is one’s culinary preference) and chances are the Wok City diner listing will get very few clicks.

Is this fair? What if there were tons of people that visited and enjoyed the Wok City diner. Should there not be a way to factor in their opinions into the pecking (or listing) order? Will merchants with satisfied customers, but shoestring budgets always be relegated to the bottom of search listings?

Thanks to the Internet, at least one can search more effectively through Yellow Page listings. But, think for a moment at the offline method of plain category-alphabetical listings. Merchants pay to simply add a few lines of text in a book. No way to track who views the ad, how many people inquire as a result of the ad and what percent of customers are ‘converts’ from the original ad. Thus resulting in complete lack of transparency for marketing campaigns and no way that I can think of to effectively measure ROI for dollars spent.

Services like Yellow Pages will always be hostage to merchants with large ad budgets. On, the other hand, the democratization culture has ensured that cash-strapped sites can also attract a lot of eyeballs