De Gule Sider

The major reason for users to leave a site is when running into “no results”. By adding value to existing structured content Apptus can minimizes the number of times this happens. We find, refine and analyze additional web content, aimed to minimize “no hits”-queries, making sure the advertiser is always being well presented online. The Apptus Search ™ technology provides an intuitive and accurate search experience, boosting your return frequency by providing a rich local search.

In 2006 De Gule Sider, leading information service in Denmark, decided to add addition values to the web-link feature. “We made a decision to offer, to hundreds of thousands buyers, the ability to gain more relevancies in their search. Google has a vast array of content and links, but you really aren't getting the vertical focus you can get on DGS” says Patrick Mesterton – Director, DGS Online

At the same time the advertisers asked for more value for their investments. The process of producing the advertisers profile pages was manually managed and time consuming, so the customer penetration did not fulfill the sales efforts full potential. Detailed search queries, such as “sony ericsson p910i” did not generate any hits, simply because the data was not there.

Apptus came up with a solution to analyze all web content to find the most relevant product page. Present a text chunk from advertiser’s website and display the specific web link pointing directly to the product page within the site. DGS liked the idea and the search of the yellow pages was extended to also cover the unstructured web sites. This means that even if a query would fall through the yellow pages database, it would still generate relevant hits.



“Crawling the web from a yellow perspective is a different challenge than building a web index. People searching directories are interested in products, price and contact information” explains Michael Mokhberi, Apptus Vp Strategic Business Development. “Our challenge was to find the optimal balance between data volume and relevancy for the Danish web - a challenge we were ready to take”

Measurable results

The open interface of the platform provides the data managers and information officers at DGS a comfortable control and insight into the system. They can follow the path of a web page through the entire process and see exactly what happened, when and why. The behavior and coverage of the system can easily be updated making the solution extremely resource efficient.

The new search engine handles over more than 300 queries per second on a few low cost Linux based servers and provides end-users with the ability to search the web from a commercial view with high relevance and without experience performance issues.
“The no-hit ratio has dropped with almost 50 % and the deep links shown towards relevant pages within the advertiser web site adds new and measurable values to our offerings” says Kenan Carki, Technical Specialist, DGS Online

“Apptus technology platform, branch expertise and cost-efficiency have elevated our roadmap in a rapid pace and pushed us forward toward new strategic goals. We are truly impressed”, says Patrick Mesterton – Director, DGS Online