• by Shankar Gupta , July 15, 2005

In an effort to compete in the growing local search market, SuperPages.com this week has completed a set of redesigns and upgrades that make the site look and feel more like a search engine such as Google Local or Yahoo! Local.

Among other changes, the search fields were simplified and relocated to the top of the homepage, while tabs were added for searches in merchandise, eBay auctions, and Web pages. On the advertising side, SuperPages is also beginning to incorporate formats pioneered by search engines. It already includes pay-per-click search ads, and will incorporate pay-per-call ads by the end of the summer, according to Robyn Rose, SuperPages.com's director of product and channel marketing.

"We are in many ways taking the aspects that we admire in search engines and adding them into our site from a user perspective, in the same way that search engines are adding things from IYPs [Internet Yellow Pages] that they like," Rose said.

Overall, SuperPages.com accounts for .02 percent of total U.S. Internet visits, while Yahoo!'s local search product .31 percent of U.S. Internet visits; Google Local, a newcomer, which grew 464 percent in the last six months, now captures .007 percent of total U.S. Internet visits. In the last six months, SuperPages.com has increased its total Internet market share by 86 percent -- part of which might be due to the addition of several traffic partners that had been taken offline for evaluation, according to a spokeswoman.

Kelsey Group analyst Greg Sterling said local search engines like Google Local and Yahoo! Local have conditioned users to expect a certain degree of ease of use, and now Internet Yellow Pages is working to catch up to that standard. "Google and Yahoo! and other search engines have really conditioned user expectations from a usability standpoint," he said. "[Internet Yellow Pages] didn't meet the ease of use standard that was established in the wake of the rise of Google and Yahoo!"

Sterling added that while Internet Yellow Pages like SuperPages.com competes with local search engines, they also offer their advertisers different services. While local search engines deliver high volumes of traffic, IYPs deliver users who are further along in the buying process, and more ready to make a final purchase decision. "There's room for both of them in the market, there's definitely some competitive issues there, but I don't think it ends up with one clearly winning and the other clearly not winning," he said.