Send To Mobile can be regarded as either Good News or Bad News. It’s a new feature on YellowPages.com, so presumably something extra should be good. As they say, “Now you can send a business listing or driving directions directly to your mobile phone using the YellowPages.com Send to Mobile link!”
The Mobile Web is where the really big money will be made in 2007. So any serious local search player will need to have a mobile strategy. YellowPages.com is the first of the Yellow Pages websites to do this, but the others won’t be far behind. In doing this, they are only catching up with the major local search engines such as Yahoo Local, Google Maps, Windows Live Local, and the IAC properties Citysearch and AskCity.
The downside of this is that it is an example of not working hard enough on the One Web principle. When one device must send the available content in another format to another device, that’s not the One Web principle in action. The ideal of course is that Local Search can be done directly on the Mobile device with results returned to the Mobile device. That will likely only be a satisfactory user experience when the Mobile Device can use interactive voice recognition processes to accept and respond to the Local Search request. Until then, I guess we must continue with that Send to Mobile link.
Tip of the hat: Search Engine Land
Tags: local search, Cellphone
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