mylocal.com.au

what do people think about it?

[graeme]

anyone had any experience with www.mylocal.com.au? i know that if people search from that page, it shows the normal ppc listings etc, but if people actually trawl through the directory, they'll get different listings. Anyone had any experience with these - whether they'll give much traffic and how much they cost?

G

[anallawalla]

It is a poor user experience. The categories are weird - where does an ISP or Internet company fit?

Being curious, I looked and was fascinated to find this:

All Categories > Property and Business Services > Business Services > Other Business Services > Computer Bulletin Board Services
All Locations, VIC, Melbourne - City

There seemed to be hundreds of bulletin board services in every suburb of Melbourne! When I got to the lowest level, they looked like computer shops! If these shops have paid to be here, I doubt if anyone will see the listings.

[Bennie]

Personally I think it's a joke, but then I may have a slightly biased opinion.

This space will get very compeditive as the two giants finally wake up and start building some more dynamic sites that bridge the gap between USER and CONTENT.

Watch for some Web 2.0 ish sites to be launched by the big players in Aus soon

*winks at ya*

[asiaseo]

Seeing that we are all awake on this side of the world, what's the 7 relevance in Yahoo7?
Just clicking the normal search is comes up with great results for us in Asia with plenty of local sites, tried a search for a town in NZ and came up with plenty of .co.nz, then did similar for Cairns and got plenty of either .com.au or if they were .com they were obviously 'local' businesses.
Ho do you rate Yahoo7 compared witn the others?

[leadegroot]

The '7' in Yahoo7 relates to an agreement betwen Yahoo and Australia' Channel 7 television station.

[Dave_A]

You will find that www.mylocal.com.au is a Ninemsn search engine from Microsoft by the look of it.
From what I have heard they are trying to develop local search abilities and not doing very well with it by the look of the results coming back from it which appear to be almost random results.

[asiaseo]

Dave and others in the region, what are your opinions on results from ninemsn and Yahoo7?

[Bennie]

in what regard asiaseo?

[asiaseo]

Quality of the search results

[Bennie]

Personally I don't really think they are that relevant, especially more compeditive areas like travel.

Both SE's need to seriously address the players that are gaming the system (hehe, what's new), they are not that hard to identify and it's a shame they can't catch them with the algo's.

I really think the main issue is they have not really looked at the inbounds correctly and consider anything vagely ontopic as an equal vote. If they took a step back and analysed the quality of the inbounds a little more, the results would be much cleaner.

To me it seems like quality .gov .edu and even legit .org links are not given as much weight in MSN and Yahoo, either that or the 'fresh' factor overrides old links. It's a shame as most of what I would consider to be authourities tank out badly. They could also be getting lost in an attempt to include resorts and hotels etc. in the SERPS.

Either way they are a little behind G, but def ahead in other areas. I have noticed MSN is very good at finding smaller resorts and including them on bigger serps rather than the 'thin affiliates' that generally clutter the results ;)

(Not that thin affiliates aren't cool ;-P)