PagesJaunes // Business Case

PagesJaunes, The leader of telephone directories has choosen Pertimm as their search engine bobth for PagesJaunes, PagesBlanches, the telephone transactions via SMS, and for the 118008 phone operators.

Paris April 27 2007 – Today people have several choices to look for an address or a business: search engines, telephone directories … Since 1997 on the web, pagesjaunes.fr, online search service became in just a few years one of the top 10 most visited French sites. For many users, this site is THE reference to look for a phone number, a restaurant or a doctor in their town.

To differentiate from the competition, and straighten its dynamic of growth, Pages Jaunes decided to upgrade its web site by making its interface simpler. Looking for help in this important project Pages Jaunes call for the competence of Pertimm, whose mission was to enhance the precision of the queries while accelerating the response time.

Forms tuned to every need

The first step was to facilitate the search of the user, proposing 2 different types of input forms:

• A simple one needing only 2 fields instead of 5
• A so-called "advanced" search for more accurate demands needing more parameters.
• On top of that the page displaying the answers would allow to tune, filter or be helped on a next search.

New challenges for a search engine

Very quickly it was noticed that the old search engine could not support these functions. The specifications were adding 10 times as much software resources than the current version. The new engine must be able of improvement, to have new parameters, and adaptable by PagesJaunes personnel.

Pertimm a French Software publisher specialize in search engines proposed a multimedia searching platform from which 2 applications were developed, a semantic search engine and a software to enhance and accelerate data base accesses. This accelerator was chosen to handle the challenges.

The PagesJaunes search engine is organized around a web interrogation center which is the heart of the interrogation system.

Every user request is built along two axis:

• Geographical zone (the Where question)
• The content searched for ( then Who/What question)

The interrogaation center handles the coordination of the processes between applications. To give an answer to the user, it slices the queries in batches and queries the applications within the architecture. For the search engine, this means expanding the query from 12 to 40 queries. Response time was thus especially critical.

The interrogation center handles the coordination of the processes between applications.

Paris, April 23 2008 – Last Tuesday, PagesJaunes launched its new directory service by SMS based on Pertimm’s software, produced by this French publisher of search engines solutions.

The new information service allows to ask and get an answer quickly about the contact data of a professional or an individual via a simple SMS message. This is based on the PagesJaunes.fr web site. Searching has been optimized to provide ease of use and relevance of results. Search can be done by activity, number or name. Pertimm's search engine can also identify and recognize abbreviations, would it be about districts, street names, activities or names. The order of the words is irrelevant for the user. For the rest, it just involves sending an SMS.

So, to get the address of a butcher in the 6th district of Paris just type in the SMS dedicated space “Butcher Paris 6” and then dial 32008. A few seconds after The user receives another SMS as a reply. If he/she is not pleased he/she can get another answer, then a third… Every time it just costs an SMS.