PagesJaunes

October 2007

Press release

PagesJaunes chose Pertimm to speed up the search engine for the new version of its website, pagesjaunes.fr.

Paris, October 11, 2007 – Today's consumers have several alternatives to locate an address or a professional, including search engines and telephone services. Present on the World Wide Web since 1997, pagesjaunes.fr, a local, on-line search service, has become in just a few years one of France's ten most visited sites. For many Internet users, it is THE website when it comes to searching for a telephone number, a restaurant or a doctor in one's area.

To stand out from the competition and further strengthen its growth, PagesJaunes decided to modify its website, to make it even more attractive and user-friendly. The pagesjaunes.fr team chose to rely on the knowledge and skills of Pertimm to aid them in this huge undertaking.

On-line forms best suited to every need

The first step consisted of facilitating the Internet user's search, by offering:

• A simplified form with only 2 - rather than the previous 5 - fields (what, who? / where?),
• A "results" page which allows the user to fine-tune or filter search, or to carry out an assisted search.

New stakes for the search engine

It quickly became necessary to come up with new solutions to support these new functionalities. The new site required nearly ten times more resources to support the additional specifications. The new search engine needed to be adaptable and programmable by the PagesJaunes team.

Pertimm, a French software publisher specialized in search engines, therefore proposed a multimedia research platform, from which two applications were then developed: a semantic search engine and a query accelerator for the database, the Pertimm Database Accelerator (PDBA). To meet the new challenges of its website, PagesJaunes chose to set up a PDBA.

A new search engine

The pagesjaunes.fr search engine is organized around two main elements: the query interpreter and the actual search engine.

Each user query is divided into two main search areas:

• The geographical zone (the "where").
• The search content (the "what/who").

The pagesjaunes.fr query interpreter interrogates the Pertimm search engine according to the content of the user query. For the search engine, this represents an average of 12 queries.

PDBA: an important component in the new pagesjaunes.fr architecture.

The Pertimm DataBase Accelerator provides optimal access to the entire pagesjaunes.fr national address database.

Pertimm carries out the following operations, as needed:

• A results count for each query, as well as queries of potential interest to the user.
• A sorting process that takes into account not only the pertinence of the results according to very specific linguistic criteria, but also all the advertising information.
• Management of all data-processing and sorting operations according to geographic proximity.
• Transfer of contents tagged according to the query criteria, for an effective highlighting at the level of the user interface.

All of these operations are programmable by PagesJaunes, ensuring an incomparable level of adaptability for everything that has to do with the searching for and the pertinence and sorting of data.

The Pertimm solution provides 24-hour service 7 days a week from two separate locations, by guaranteeing the coherency and integrity of data, as well as undisrupted service, even in the event of a problem occurring at one of the two sites.

A few key figures

• 2 separate sites
• 100 million technical Pertimm queries per day
• 200 ms for the most complex queries

About Pertimm

Created in 1997 by a team of three engineers, Pertimm is a French software vendor specializing in multimedia search engines, using linguistics and semantics to "drill for data", whatever may be the nature, structure or organization of the data media involved.

Based in France at Asnières-sur-Seine (92 Department) and Valence (26 Department) and in the USA, Pertimm has a staff of 20. In 2004, the company was awarded the Innovative Start-Up Label prize from Anvar.

About PagesJaunes SA

PagesJaunes is a subsidiary of the PagesJaunes Group (listed on Euronext Paris). It is Europe's number one on-line directory publisher (pagesjaunes.fr, qdq.com) and France's number one print directory publisher (the PagesJaunes directory, L’Annuaire and PagesPro). In France, PagesJaunes also offers a telephone information service (118 008). With 638,399 advertisers in 2006, PagesJaunes is France's number two company in terms of advertising-based profits.

For more information on PagesJaunes, visit: www.bienvenue.pagesjaunes.fr

Pertimm Press Contact

Silvy Bikok
Tél : 01 47 33 88 49

PagesJaunes Press Contact

Orith Tabeur
Tél : 01 46 23 34 64