YAD: SourceTool.com
New B2Blog term: YAD-- Yet Another Directory
SourceTool.com B2B Directory Launched · MarketingVOX: "Former executives from B2B search directory ThomasB2B.com have launched a new supplier directory at SourceTool.com"
What's makes this YAD different:
- Conextual ad revenue based (i.e. AdSense)
- Use of UNSPSC (United Nations) business classification
- Search results are limited to companies and just link to their home pages
- The website is based on an open-source CMS back-end (Joomla)
- No salespeople to call me
Thomas had killed the thomasb2b project earlier this year. Looks like these guys want to take that idea and run with it. Unfortunately, the way the website is set-up, it doesn't encourage searching. Look at their home page, for goodness sakes (even their search page sucks, IMHO). The site is ready to go, I don't know why they are running the site this way.
Their search results are pretty good just because they are limited to business websites, but the stack of grey-text keywords below each is almost unreadable. They make a big deal of the UNSPSC classification system, but they make it invisible in the search results, so I'm not sure how our company is classified in their system.
In summary, this YAD gets a 'yadda, yadda, yadda' rating.
6 Comments:
At December 15, 2005 9:15 AM, SourceTool said…
Dave,
Thanks for the feedback. I went back & forth on the grey type below the company url. I could go up a point size, but -- at least for my eyes -- it's readable.
We're focused on getting people to read the stuff about UNSPSC which is why we don't emphasize search on the home page.
The way we use UNSPSC to list companies is described in the section on "Classify your company."
You need to create a sourcetool.txt file and place it on the root directory of your website so we can see what you make and classify according.
Does your "YAD" rating take into traffic count -- nothing yadda about a B2B site scoring 600 per million on Alexa. RE look n feel, Craig Newmark (Craig's List) has convinced me design doesn't mean anything. But I could be wrong.
-Dan
At December 15, 2005 10:13 AM, Dave J. said…
Dan--
Its easy to be a critic, but I know making a website can be devilishly hard.
I'll try out the UNSPSC txt file process. If this is your goal for us marketers to do, though, keep working on how to drive us to action and show us how to do it.
Good luck.
At January 02, 2006 9:05 PM, Geoff said…
Looked over the site and the directory is robust.
One thing they should fix is to reference the tool bar on the left not the right in the definition of Alexa
At January 02, 2006 9:08 PM, Geoff said…
Dan;
The site looks good and the directory is robust, although using all our old favorite searches I was not able to return a single company.
Watch out for a few typos and goodluck
At January 12, 2006 10:15 AM, SourceTool said…
Dave, Geoff,
Take a look at the new search result software we're testing. From the http://directory.sourcetool.com site, enter a query in the search box. We think it's a big improvement and are interested in other users' comments.
-Dan
At July 14, 2006 6:02 PM, MediaMavrick said…
A year or so later, this site has really grown and is getting lots of new profiles every day. Traffic too is up to 350,000 per day.
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