What’s The Matter With IYPs?-Part 1
Mary Bowling | 25 February 2008 |
The Internet Yellow Pages Taxonomy
IYPs stands for Internet Yellow Pages. They are also referred to as OYPs or Online Yellow Pages. To me the most frustrating thing about trying to use them is their taxonomy or classification system, which places businesses into established categories.
While this imposes order onto what could be a chaotic system, the classifications in the phone book are very rigid and do not necessarily reflect the ways that most people search for you.
My favorite example is with medical practices. Most of us will naturally search for doctor and not for physician, and, if we know what kind of doctor we want, we will immediately search for that specifically. But what happens when you look in the Superpages for foot doctor? I see:
The IYPs obviously want to use the terms physician and surgeon instead of doctor, even though doctor is the term most people would use. If I don’t want to have surgery, have no idea what podiatry is and the big bump on my toe has nothing to do with sports, none of these will look like good choices for me. I think I’ll go search the web, instead.
And what if I have bad headaches and I don’t even know what kind of doctor go to, so I search for headache doctor.
These results aren’t very helpful to me, especially since I have a headache and am not reasoning well. So, I try doctor for headache and the results are even less useful, as I am given the Aspen Center for Women’s Health and Aspen Center for Cosmetic Surgery. Whaaaaat? I’ll guess I’ll go see if Google Maps can help me out.
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