PagesJaunes Launches a New White Pages Service that Incorporates Social Networking Content and Reinforces the Company's Leadership in People Search on the Internet

24/03/2010

Pagesblanches.fr ("white pages France") is a 'meta directory' for the general public that incorporates the company's own white pages content with public information from six top social networking sites. This evolution is part of PagesJaunes strategy to enrich its content and build its audience for Internet people search.

•  Pagesblanches.fr ("white pages France") is a 'meta directory' for the general public that incorporates the company's own white pages content with public information from six top social networking sites.

•  This evolution is part of PagesJaunes strategy to enrich its content and build its audience for Internet people search.

PagesBlanches Evolves People Search on the Internet

Pagesblanches.fr search results incorporate information from six leading social networking sites in France, indexed via Exalead technology: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Trombi, CopainsDavant, and Viadeo.

PagesBlanches represents nearly 30% of pagesjaunes.fr visits, with 9 million unique visitors each month. The new service evolves the current model of household-centered search tied to fixed telephone lines to one which is more closely aligned with today's diversity in communication methods. With newly extended content, PagesBlanches now serves as a meta-directory for all Internet users, especially younger users, who are ultra-connected and who often use only a mobile phone.

Enriching Content to Improve the User Experience and Spur Innovation

To simply identification of a person sought, PagesBlanches enables search refinement that goes far beyond first and last name, using criteria such as geography, schools attended, employers, photos and more. The PagesBlanches directory is thus enhanced with select content from the Internet in order to guarantee the most comprehensive and reliable results possible.

The site's development and monetization strategy will be focused on the further enrichment of editorial content and the implementation of new partnerships.

A Content Publishing Strategy for Both Businesses and Individuals

The new PagesBlanches service advances PagesJaunes' strategy to develop its role as a publisher of local, practical information.

Julien Billot, General Manager of Internet Strategies at PagesJaunes Group, notes: "As a major player in the French Internet market, we are committed to accompanying our users in the discovery and development of practical new uses and benefits derived from Web 2.0 innovations and the explosive growth in social networking. This new service responds to this ambition. Whether one is searching for a business or an individual, PagesJaunes is now more than ever the resource of reference for those seeking practical, local information."

As part of its commitment to protect personal data, PagesBlanches allows any individual to make a request directly on the PagesBlanches site that his or her profile be removed.

 

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A propos de PagesJaunes SA

PagesJaunes is France's leader in advertising and local information publishing on the Internet (pagesjaunes.fr, pagespro.com), in the mobile market (with services available on more than 170 smartphone models), and in print (the PagesJaunes Directory and the PagesBlanches Directory). PagesJaunes is also one of the leaders in the French markets for information service delivery via telephone and SMS (118008) and online classifieds publishing (annoncesjaunes.fr), and France’s top creator of web sites.

In 2009, more than nine in ten French residents used PagesJaunes services, and more than 700,000 advertisers relied on PagesJaunes to promote their businesses. PagesJaunes is a subsidiary of PagesJaunes Groupe (listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange). For more information about PagesJaunes, visit www.bienvenue.pagesjaunes.fr

A propos de Exalead

Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead® is a global software provider in the enterprise and Web search markets. Exalead's worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, American Greetings and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead's technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with a platform, Exalead CloudView™ that uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilised data in the disparate, heterogeneous enterprise information cloud. The system collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications.

Exalead is an operating unit of Qualis, an international holding company, with offices in Paris, San Francisco, Glasgow, Milan and Darmstadt. Readers who wish to gain more information about Exalead can contact (415) 230 3800.