Mark Mansour here (tech lead) – I’m going to follow up on some of your questions.

Voting – votes (or Word Of Mouth as we call it), in a normal search, are indicated on the left hand side of each business. They are deliberately not added into the relevancy of a listing which means that businesses with more votes do not get any advantage of those with no votes. You can, however, sort your search results by WOM to see the most voted businesses first.

On the technical front, I’m glad you like the markup (thanks for looking under the komondo). Our HTML could always be better. Our tech stack is pretty interesting and outside the norm for Sensis. We use Ruby and Rails for the front end, FAST as our search server, PostgreSql as our database server and Nginx as our web server. I think you’ve inspired a full blog post on this topic – I’ll put one together soon.

Mark

I’m so pleased that Sensis are looking at new ways of getting their information out of the cellar, congratulations on that front already.

As for the web site, I like the design so far and it’s easy to navigate and explore new features.

I think the voting concept for business information is going to be great once you’ve got enough data backing it and will really help expose the businesses doing a great job.

As a matter of interest, how does the voting work as I sorted by votes and noticed that items with votes didn’t automatically float to the top – are there other factors? When viewing results in ‘best match’ order, what says that business A is better than B and should be listed before it?

On a slightly more technical front, I had a look under the hood and I’m feeling the love of nice clean markup – such a rare thing in complex sites in general these days; great to see.

What does your development stack look like for Labs (.NET/Java/Python/Ruby/mySQL/Oracle/MSSQL/..) and so on – I’m fascinated to know what you’ve gone from with the existing Sensis sites and where you’ve gone to and why!

Al.

Thanks Dr Steve (although I suspect it isn’t John C Riley) I think being able to tag content is a great first step in looking at user generated content and I’m interested to see how everyone will use it.

Keep up the feedback and let us know what else you would like to see in the Lab.

Cheers
Anthony

Even better! my ‘giants are rad’ tag is added straight to the ‘related keywords’ for everyone to see, rite under the map when searching for bikes in Melbourne! Hell i can even search straight up for ‘giants are rad’ and BOOM there’s the bikes shop with my awesome tag..

Users adding their honest, agenda free opinions does more then any form traditional form of advertising, you’ve added another dimension on integrity to your content which enhances the service for advertisers and users alike.

Regards,
Dr. Steve Brule

P.S. remember giants bikes are so rad rite now..

Thanks for the feedback. We are one step ahead on the keyword cloud. Try searching on Cafe in Melbourne (http://yellowlab.com.au/search/results?q=cafe&l=melbourne). You can click the ‘related words’ under the map to generate a new search on Yellow Lab.

Let me know what you think.

Cheers
Anthony

Cheers

Rob Gerber
Customer Insights Manager – Sydney