DEX doesn’t really know much
So I am a member of the local search group on LinkedIn and saw a press release posted there where DexKnows announced that through an agreement with Maponics it was now offering ‘intuitive neighbourhood-level search”.
Sounded interesting, what the heck does that mean you may ask? Well it seems that intuitive neighbourhood-level search means that instead of needing to search for ‘cobbler’, searchers can use a more intuitive term like ‘shoe repair’ to get what they want. And neighborhood search means instead of searching in an area like “New York or a zip code like 10024 for example, you can use a more common neighborhood reference like “Upper West Side”.
So how did it work? Well I first tried searching for “bagels” on the Upper West Side. Now I don’t eat that many bagels, but there is one borderline famous bagel place on the heart of the upper west side called H&H bagel… and it didn’t show in the results. According to DEXKnows there are all of 14 bagel places on the Upper West Side… and even a quick glance at the results reveals that at least two of the 14 don’t exist, with alleged locations on residential side streets.
I tried again this time for the term “toy stores” in the same location. Another huge miss… a few pseudo matches like a Game Stop store and a stationary store that also sells toys, but according to Dex there are eight in total on the upper west side and of those eight only four were stores you could actually walk into and buy a toy. If you don’t know the area… this is an absurdly low number.
I am not sure where Dex is breaking down, but its missing a LOT of businesses and frequently shows businesses in areas where no retail stores exist. Typing in a search for a place like “upper west side”, doesn’t prevent it from returning results from many other areas like the east side and midtown. The result is a very poor customer experience.
DexKnows is one of many DEX branded marketing products under the DEX Advantage brand umbrella of former telephone directory stalwart R.H. Donnelley. If you haven’t followed the happenings with R.H. Donnelley recently, well neither have I… but it seems that they filed bankruptcy recently and went from a multi billion dollar market cap to microcap extremely quickly. While it’s great that they’re looking to the future beyond the print directory business, and are trying to innovate with more intuitive local search, but the execution here has a very long way to go!
