Just saw that another local search engine has been released: YellowBot.

And so another chapter in my ‘reviewing and criticizing local search sites’.

I will first send our attention to this: Yellowbot.com - Social Networking and Local Search. Why don’t we go over their feature-list:

Local Search - An obvious one. Dozens of sites for that
Advanced Search Filters - I see no ‘advanced search’ option. I’m going to chalk this up as buzzword sensation
Tagging - Been there, done that with iBegin ;)
Ratings and Reviews - The staple of all local sites
Recommendations - The only thing I saw was ‘recommended - yes or no’. Seems like simplified version of a review. Similar to our own ‘Favorites’
Business Details - Unless details are the basic name + address + category, I missed something.
Uploaded Pictures - Another staple
MyAccount Page - Again, another staple
Blog - I don’t see a way for users to blog, so I imagine this is the company blog. Old hat
Forum - Another staple (be it in the form of ‘Talk’ or ‘Community’ or even ‘Q&A’ - same thing)

Other things to nitpick:

  • When adding a review, a nice inline popup appears, and then a nasty redirect to the login page. Why even bother with that guys?
  • http://www.yellowbot.com/tags/food/El%20Paso%2C%20TX%2079922/page1.html is not a proper URL. You need to add url encoding
  • On the map page of this listing, what’s with the ‘Good to Know’? (plus you wrote it as ‘el Paso’ heh)
  • Your MapView is busted - no icons for above ‘100′ it seems. It would be prudent to use the ‘bounding’ function in GoogleMaps so it auto-zooms in as close as it can

In your WebProNews interview, you said people do not get the connection between offline and online. In what ways are you guys making that connection better?