Now you can let your fingers do the walking in a whole new way. Long the master of local, YellowPages.com has unveiled another effort to dominate local search—this time on your phones.
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With its new downloadable local mobile search apps, you can find the best restaurants, stores and other businesses near you.
This is delivered through a partnership with AT&T—the apps are available for not only the iPhone but 20 other AT&T devices. It looks like you may be out of luck unless you have an AT&T phone. Of course, since AT&T owns YellowPages.com, this isn’t entirely surprising.
I don’t quite get this part of the release, though:
iPhone users can now easily find local businesses and services by going to www.yellowpages.com on their Safari browser and inputting a search term or category and location.
Now, is it just me, or does forcing your users to go to your website kind of defeat the purpose of creating a downloadable web app?
Overall, these apps sound pretty useful. They:
- let you save your favorite listings and locations
- use auto-complete (which we know can be a huge time saver—or the most annoying feature on the planet)
- provide ratings and automatic “click”-to-call features for business listing
- give maps and driving directions—as well as biking and walking directions.
- use GPS (in phones with GPS enabled) automatically in maps and directions.
Sigh. I wish my phone could do that. The apps join YellowPages.com’s other efforts in the mobile arena, including a SMS-based 411 service for local businesses (YP411) and the ability to send results from YellowPages.com to your mobile phone, including driving directions.
It does seem, however, that AT&T has an awful lot of control in this arrangement.
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