“Surfing the web” is a thing of the past for many consumers. Today’s tech-savvy consumers want to find business information quickly and conveniently – they’re searching with a purpose and expecting relevant results. A new whitepaper, “Measuring Local Search Relevance,” released today by CrowdFlower, the leader in enterprise crowdsourcing, revealed that YP.com delivered higher user satisfaction with local search results, compared to Google Maps, Bing Local and Yahoo! Local.

YP engaged CrowdFlower to create an innovative methodology to evaluate consumer satisfaction with the relevance of local search results. For over a year, CrowdFlower analyzed approximately 13,000 local search query results per month to track user satisfaction as a proxy for relevancy of local search results across YP.com, Bing Local (bing.com/local), Google Maps (maps.google.com) and Yahoo! Local (local.yahoo.com). The local search engines were chosen to compare relevancy because of their high user reach and ability to offer search results across all local business categories. Crowd contributors were shown results for a local search query (a search term and geography pair) from four different engines and asked to rate each result set as Perfect, OK, Bad or Can’t Tell/Invalid Search.

Findings from the analysis include:

• YP.com delivered local search results that consistently matched or beat the relevance of the other top local search engines results. For example, users were satisfied with YP.com search results 86 percent of the time, compared to 83 percent for Google Maps, 82 percent for Yahoo! Local and 74 percent for Bing Local.
• YP.com outperformed all local search engines for named searches of specific businesses.
• YP.com consistently outperformed Bing Local and Yahoo! Local in satisfaction with relevance, and remained competitive with Google Maps for full search queries.
• Across specific categories, YP.com performed better than, or on par with, the other local search engines.
• Satisfaction rates for YP.com search results in top categories were above 90 percent. Among those categories were: Insurance (100 percent), Restaurants (98 percent), Credit Unions (90 percent) Attorneys (98 percent), Auto Repair and Service (96 percent), Beauty Salons (96 percent) and Florists (96 percent).

“Most major search companies have their results manually reviewed by a team of people — it's one of the best ways to measure the effects of constant updates to their search algorithms — but a dedicated team can be difficult to scale,” said Ari Klein, director of customer success for CrowdFlower. “CrowdFlower was, in fact, founded by search scientists solving that exact problem. By crowdsourcing the evaluation, we've been able to dramatically shorten YP's feedback loop and allowed them to perform more frequent and accurate competitive analysis. It's phenomenal to see that our innovative approach, coupled with their expertise, has helped YP maintain leadership in the local search space.”

The “Measuring Local Search Relevance” paper was written by Ari Klein, director of customer success for CrowdFlower. YP engaged CrowdFlower to develop this innovative methodology to evaluate search relevancy and provided raw data to support the evaluation. All opinions expressed within the white paper are solely those of CrowdFlower.

For more results and details on the methodology, analysis and results, please download the free white paper “Measuring Local Search Relevance” posted here: http://blog.crowdflower.com/ and http://corporate.yp.com/searchrelevance.

About CrowdFlower

CrowdFlower is the leading microtask crowdsourcing platform, offering quality-ensured crowdsourcing solutions at unprecedented scale. The company solves problems ranging from product categorization to business lead verification to content creation. Our world-class client roster enjoys increased flexibility, faster turnaround time, and cost savings for their data and information needs. For more information, visit the CrowdFlower blog (blog.crowdflower.com).