Using Distance Bands to Rank Search Results for Business Categories
Today we’re revealing a sneak peak at another twist to our search relevance algorithm — one that strikes a balance between our traditional sponsored listings approach and pure distance-based sorting, both of which you can use on YELLOWPAGES.COM today.
The new approach is simple — we take the listings that would normally be returned by a search for a business category on YELLOWPAGES.COM, and group them into five distance bands, or rings, based on their proximity to the geographic center of the search. (We already do something similar for searches for business names; we’re experimenting with this new approach only for business/product categories.)
So if you search for “lighting fixtures” in Fremont, CA, you first see the businesses that are located within 1 mile of the center of Fremont, then the businesses within 3 miles, then 5 miles, then 10, and finally within 20 miles.
By treating all businesses within a given band as equally close to the target location, we eliminate the effect of distance within the band. So a listing that’s 4.9 miles away might appear higher in the results than one that’s 3.1 miles away, but neither of them would appear before one that’s 2.5 miles away. We can think of this as a technique for reducing the impact of small differences in distance, where the definition of “small” changes with each band. (As the distance from the center-point of the search increases, the sensitivity to differences in distance decreases. Intuitively, it’s easy to understand that the difference between 0.4 miles and 1.4 miles is much greater than the difference between 10.4 and 11.4 miles).
This approach isn’t perfect. For some business categories — particularly service-oriented ones — geographic proximity isn’t much of an issue, so it’s inappropriate to put *any* significant weight on distance when ordering the results. In others, we believe this “compromise” sorting method may do a good job of serving the needs of both users and advertisers. As always, please use the comments section below to let is know whether you think it works, and why or why not!
29 Responses to “Using Distance Bands to Rank Search Results for Business Categories”
January 14th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
This is really cool! But from what I see, the listings are listed ALPHABETICALLY within those rings. I can see how that would be useful to a user, but how does it benefit the people who advertise on the site? For example, what if an advertiser 5 miles away had purchased a Platinum Listing with 1900 points? Would that advertiser appear before a related business 2 miles away with a free listing?
This seems to be another example where the development team is constantly has to weigh the benefit of users vs. benefit of advertisers, and I am interested in discovering which the developers tend to favor. Or how they go about combining the two.
Thanks!
January 14th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
It will not work for me. I have a shop at home business that covers 2 counties. My sales people travel to customers homes to measure, have the customer select blinds and colors that go in their homes. I depend on my advertising to have homeowners,businesses and government agencies from both counties to call me before they call other companies in my catagory. Why would I advertise in more than one area if I didn’t come out in the top six ads?
Please respond to me about this
Thank you
Barry Berman
January 19th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
The Student Leadership Accademy of Venice is not on your list of Middle Schools, with over 270 students This Grade “A:” school should be listed. ?????????/
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Tony,
You can have a contact from the school use the advertise with us link and add a free listing for themselves. We are also considering the option of an ‘add new listing’ feature in the future.
-Coby
January 28th, 2009 at 8:21 am
Consider sorting your popular searches on the home page by search location. Who cares about Dominos in nowhere, Utah. You could sell those as ads. Get clever, and you can reduce your rates and irrelevancy, and potentially increase traffic.
January 30th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Charles, can you incorporate RSS into this site so I can link it to my Google Reader account?
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Dennis,
I’ve added the link and URL to the Beta Labs RSS feed to the sidebar to the right. Thanks for adding us to your feed reader!
-Jess Hamilton
February 7th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Barry,
Thanks for your question and feedback — this interaction is the reason why we created this forum . It helps us create and evaluate current and potential future site functionality such as Distance Band searches.
We are in very early stages of evaluating Distance Band and weighing the pros and cons very carefully. We understand and agree that certain categories lend themselves to hyper-local searches – dry cleaners for instance, where a user might be more interested in proximity to their requested location since they “go to them” to make a purchase or use their services. We would in this instance still serve up listings strictly based upon distance rings.
However, we are also conscious of those categories that may not lend themselves to hyper-local searches – such as attorneys. A category that we believe should provide our users with a broad range of choices and not just the just the one closest to their location.
Through questions and feedback such as yours, along with user focus groups and research, we are working hard to find the right balance between the two without losing the value you and our other advertisers are receiving. Please stay tuned for more updates on Distance Band searches and other new functionalities being considered. And keep the questions and feedback coming!
February 10th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Nice feature… although one would hope that relevance of the business to the search term within each of the bands would be a stronger factor in the ranking.. right now I’m getting less relevant businesses higher up seemingly because they are closer in proximity.
February 17th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Why doesn’t Yellowpages.com show up very well in the natural search engine results? I see Superpages.com even Yellowbook.com but I hardly see Yellowpages.com
February 20th, 2009 at 12:07 am
So, are you going to bring back the feature that was there for a long time where you type in a name, and then you could narrow it by a street in that column on the left by typing in the street name? Or typing government as the main search, then narrowing it by the department in the same entry box? That’s gone, and it’s sorely missed. I can’t find things for my customers now that I used to be able to look up with no problem.
March 14th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
This would be useful to us. I am glad you are offering it as a new feature.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Ok
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:16 am
hi…just wanna say i really like your service… and it do helps people a lot…tnx
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:23 am
yeah… this is so cool… and i’m sure that the information also using this stuff… well i hope you make it pink too make it uch cooler… ^-^
April 27th, 2009 at 8:11 am
Hi Beta Lab Folks!
Wanted to send this as an email, but y’all don’t list them!
Question regarding APIs: I tried out some of the searches and they look really good – relevant results for location and they’re fast too! Do you guys (and gals!) have any plans to open up an API?
Thanks!
May 2nd, 2009 at 12:40 pm
assume someone is searching for a specific type of basketball. because your algorithm ranks the results by proximity, a small sporting goods store 0.5 miles from epicenter that is less likely to have the basketball than the larger sporting goods store 2.5 miles from epicenter is ranked higher. proximity is only really important for commute shopping, or shopping that is done regularly, such as to grocery stores, banks, laundromats, etc. if someone has to go on yp.com, chances are the customer is making a unique purchase and thus proximity takes a backseat to the store’s supply, or cost.
but because you never know for sure what the customer is searching for and what’s really important to him, avoid ranking your results altogether. for instance, when you display search results vertically, you’ve inherently ranked them, but when you display them, say in a circle, you’ve displayed them.
all just stuff to chew on.
May 2nd, 2009 at 8:38 pm
hey charles intresting post, you mentioned a comprimised sorting method for service-orientated customers – how are these service-orientated businesses distinguished, if by cateogries which are fitting the criteria to not be ‘ranked’ by distance for their matching service or ‘product’. for example a mobile pet groomer, or a carpet cleaning business that has the range of the whole state?
May 4th, 2009 at 12:33 am
Greg,
I agree with a number of comments you made when a user is searching for products from the web-site, in those cases, unless a user specifically asks for a distance search we do not use distances at this time.
The band search is being experimented with for use on our distance searches on the web-site (when specifically requested) and on our mobile applications where distance is often an assumed issue.
Thanks for the feedback, and look for more posts on our blog soon.
May 8th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
@christopher: Yes, we plan to use category info to determine whether to put “extra weight” on the proximity of a business to the location specified by the user. Just as you suggest, we suspect that we should put less weight of distance when users are looking for service businesses — i.e. ones that “come to you” — as opposed to things like brick-and-mortar stores. Of course we’ll be conducting user acceptance testing to see whether our shared theory is really correct …
(One final quibble: Note that we’re not talking so much about distinguishing whether a particular business is a service business, but whether the user’s intent is to find a business that provides a service.)
May 9th, 2009 at 7:44 am
**OFF TOPIC**
Got back a week or so ago from the YPA Convention in San Diego. Yellowpages.ca was big on award night. I thought I heard about something you guys might have brewing for your IYP product.
Anything you want to share with the world yet?
May 14th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
I’m new to this phone tactic, but have an extensive marketing and advertising agency background. I like researching new media as a means to drive customer traffic and transactions for advertisers.
I was thinking about clicking on an advertiser’s address and getting a branding message or special offer! Is this possible?
Thank you!
May 14th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
PS: Could the phone branding message or special offer be delivered by voice as well as visual tactic? Advertisers would probably pay for this service.
May 15th, 2009 at 11:02 am
It is great to see more geo-targeting algorithms being integrated. I always appreciate a more relevant result.
May 23rd, 2009 at 5:28 pm
nice job guys!
June 19th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
The problem I have with this type of sorting is that it has nothing to do with the location of the searcher (non mobile search). The epicenter of the search is determined by your site not by input from the user. I would like to see the results ranked by what is close to me based on my saved info. Currently if I do a search in Fayetteville Ar from the north side of town, the site tells me the closest businesses are on the south side of town. I am a registered user with my address listed so I would expect the experience to be tailored to me. Am I doing something wrong? Not a computer guy just a user of your product.
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Chris,
I understand what you are looking for, and we currently have a feature in planning stages that would allow you to reference your named addresses in the search box, so search for plumbers in #home, and it would base your search around your home address rather then the centroid defined for the geography (the center of Fayetteville, AR in your example). Unfortunately at this time I don’t have an anticipated release date for this functionality, but we feel it is important to make the site more useful to our users.
Sincerely,
-Coby Randquist
July 24th, 2009 at 11:52 am
@chris: I fully agree to ur point. Tailored webservices are really easy to built, sometimes I ask myself why a lot of websites wanna know my name address etc but don’t use it e.g while filling out a form. You could do a lot more stuff with home und mobile number (automatically send contact via sms – 1-click-experience!). But in YP search I think U have to be careful, I would only “forefill” the value of the “where” with a home adress, but the user can click it easily away. The problem with doing a fixed solution is that some users won’t understand, why home address is a default and other usability questions!
@ greg I only partially agree, because Cobys point is right, u never know when a user is doing a narrow or a wider search – to tackle this u can add quick links at the homepage to automatically fire a geotargeted search (if a home-address is in db). In addition differentiating between categories is hard to achieve, a lot of categories con be searched in near distance as well as far away. Think about restaurants, obviously a near categorie, but if u r planning a trip u r searching in another neighborhood far away.
But to tackle the real question of this thread:
Coby why don’t you let your customers decide, whether they want to advertise in a near, middle or far distance band (scale could be much more precise, but don’t want to complicate).
Existing customers can choose, whether they want a wider range of advertising, leave their accounts as they are or add another distance band (perhaps temporarily).
New costumer have to pay for these features from the start or can specific to a category order wider ranges e.g. for a national campaign.
Or you make a whole new feature out of it if possible and in agrrement with ur TOS.
Furthermore, this will possibly solve problems with sorting businesses in categories of wide and narrow searches.
Just a rough scratch of my thoughts
Sincerely,
Thorsten
January 1st, 2010 at 12:15 am
Hey thx for this blog!
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