Arabic Search on the rise

Arabic continues to grow to reach 59% of the total searches done in 2011, not as fast as you might expect it to happen, that’s only a 4% increase over 2010. See 2010 Zeitgeist>>

Arabic is dominating the search phrases with 59%

One interesting fact is that many people were looking for Tahrir Square after the #Jan25 revolution! Although sounds to me like a Google search rather than a Yellow Pages search, you never know!

Searches for Tahrir Square on Egypt Yellow Pages after #Jan25 revolution

Top Categories For 2011

The following are the most searched keywords for 2011

1. Restaurant
2. Pharmacy
3. Hotel
4. Advertising
5. Bank
6. Nursery
7. Furniture
8. School
9. Hospital
10. Real Estate

You can see that advertising is going up the list while real estate is at the bottom of the top 10 list. This shows how advertising is so important to businesses in Egypt at these tough days. Real estate industry is not living its best days though.

Top Search Keywords on EYP for 2011

Most popular sectors and industries in Egypt in 2011

Banks

1. National Bank Of Egypt
2. HSBC
3. NSGB
4. CIB

Top Egyptian banks for 2011

Restaurants and Cafes:

1. Spectra
2. burger king
3. KFC
4. cilantro
5. Cook door
6. hardees
7. pizza hut
8. la poire
9. Mo’men
10. Roastery
11. gad

Top restaurants in Egypt for 2011

Telco:

1. Vodafone
2. Mobinil
3. Etisalat

Most searched mobile network operators in Egypt for 2011

Brands and stores:

1. Samsung
2. Xerox
3. Sony
4. Appliance
5. Raya
6. Toshiba
7. Egypt Air
8. Mobile Shop
9. Panasonic
10. Jotun
11. Habitat
12. Nokia

Top searched brands in Egypt for 2011

Goodbye 2011, enough is enough… Hopefully 2012 will be a glorious year and won’t see the end of the world according to Mayan calendar time prophecy

What makes our BlackBerry application unique is not only being one of the first Egyptian publishers to join the App World, it has also been developed based on the community demand on different social networking sites especially Twitter… Our twitter friends joined out application beta testing program and provided us with very useful feedback and many additional features to add. Also their ongoing support helps us to add more features and make the application better….

A big thank you to our list of honor beta testers:

Mostafa khaled Beige

Mahmoud Ahmed

Mahmoud Abdel Aziz

Ramy Temraz

Bassem Osoris

Gamal Omar

Abdou Omar

Islam Badr

Mohammad Mokhtar Eltrissi

You can download Egypt Yellow Pages BB App from App World here.

BlackBerry App World

After waiting for it for a really long time, it has been confirmed today that BlackBerry App World is now available in Egypt. Although no official published news by RIM confirms this. Many users from Egypt have reported that they were able to access AppWorld and download application from it.

Many people wonder why did it take all this time to launch the store in Egypt. RIM has responded to this question saying that they do not launch the App World in a country unless they have signed an agreement with all the mobile operators to avail it for the users. Perhaps that could be the reason of the delay.

Egypt Yellow Pages BlackBerry Application

The launch of BB App World in Egypt must be good news for users, developers and application vendors. Distribution of BlackBerry apps is not a simple task specially with all the device and OS specific features available, which makes it harder for the application vendors to do the correct device and OS detection and avail the correct version of the application to the correct device and the appropriate OS version.

As a Yellow Pages publisher, we are very delighted about availing the Black Berry App World in Egypt which will enable us to distribute and deliver efficiently our free local search application for Egypt. Currently, you can download Egypt Yellow Pages BlackBerry application from here. It is available for Curve, Bold and Torch models. There are 2 versions of the application, one supports OS 4.6 and another one supports version 5.0 or higher which has more features and functionalities embedded.

It was fun to be here in Istanbul and have the chance to celebrate with TYP team. Way to go Turkey Yellow Pages!

Yellow.com.tr 3 yaşında!

Turkey Yellow Pages 3rd anniversary

I knew nothing about insurance so i contacted one insurance agent, his name is Mahmoud, who can give me an advice on which kind insurance fits me, there are basically 3 kinds of  insurance companies in Egypt: governmental, private and banks… Well, Mahmoud did a great job on teaching me the pros and cons of each kind of these companies, he got me offers with numbers from a bunch of them…. and he made his recommendation to me… of course i haven’t taken his words for granted but i did some more research by myself to reach the same conclusion that he recommended to me…

My final decision was to go with governmental insurance for a company that Mahmoud works for. Paying a yearly installment for the next 20 years… having chosen this installment to be small enough not to affect me under bad economy or whatsoever was a wise decision.

I have to pay my next installment on May, i only have 30 days to pay, if i’m late for 15 more days i pay a penalty, if i’m still late i my insurance is dropped and i have to re-active it again… Having know this i asked Mahmoud last year that i would like to pay my yearly installment on March of every year rather than May… why would i wait and put myself in this situation.

But now things are different right? the economy is not so good and people are afraid to spend money, so it is better to keep my cash until next May, perhaps until the end of may to utilize my time allowance until its end… Why would i pay now early 2 month in these current conditions? That’s probably what a typical sales guy would think. Right? Would he have the nerves to call me now and ask me to make my installment payment 2 month earlier? but guess what he did…

One day i came to the office and found that Mahmoud has left me his business card a couple of days ago when i was out of town and asked me to call him. When i called him he told me that he has lost all his contacts and he is trying to reach them by dropping off his business card to their work places… and he asked me whether i am still willing to pay my installment 2 months earlier as agreed… and guess what? i told him yes i am willing… there is no point in waiting, since i will have to make the payment anyway. He was a bit surprised himself… and he was happy of course, collections means bonus for him…

did he say “Why would i bother and call him now? the situation is not clear now… let’s wait until May” or “I lost his number, i am sure he is gonna call me back to pay at may or to cancel, i won’t bother myself finding his number again”

It is really small things that does matter… and in our struggling economy, good salesmen can have their companies economy rolling back again and in turn help the economy of their countries… People can just choose sit and assume and do the “WHAT-IF” analysis and do nothing… or they move and work hard to achieve their goals… Assumption is the mother of all screwups

This is one thing that makes the difference between a salesman and a good salesman…

Hosted in the Four Seasons Nile Plaza in garden city, more than 40 communications media specialists, editors and journalists covered the event that was attended by Egypt Yellow Pages strategic partners: Ministry of state of administrative development – e-Government, Nokia/Navteq, Al Masry Al Youm and Akhbarak.net

The event started with the keynote from Marc Lambert, managing director of Egypt Yellow Pages. The speech was so insightful, Marc explained how our strategic partners will help us enhance the local search services on more platforms by making it available through our partners sites and in the same time focusing on offering location based services which is the future of the local search…

Marc Lambert giving his keynote in the event

I had the opportunity then to present some figures and insights about our achievements in 2010, which ended up with us having more than 175,000 business listing in our database out of which 115,000 are geocoded. At the time i am writing this blog post, we have about 180,000 listings and approaching 120,000 geocoded listings… 2010 was also a year that witnesses tripling our website traffic from 400,000 visits per month to over 1.2 million visits, a truly new milestone for local search in Egypt.

Mohamed Salah, Director Digital Media, Egypt Yellow Pages presentation about insights and search trends in Egypt for 2010

Our partners were the ones who presented our strategic partnership details to the media, the following were representatives of  our partners:

Mathia Nalappan, General Manager – North Africa, Nokia
Phil McKinnon, Head Of Marketing – North Africa, Nokia
Mohamed Abd El-Jalil, Head Of Solutions Sales – North Africa, Nokia
Sahar Afia, Project Manager – Government Services Development Program, Ministry Of State For Administrative Development
Kismet EL-Sayed, Shareholder / Business Development Director, Al-Masry Al-Youm
Osman Ahmed Osman, Founder, Akhbarak.Net

Here are more photos from the event

Osman Ahmed Osman, Sahar Afia, Marc Lambert, Mohamed Abd El-Jalil, and Kismet El-Sayed

Lars Morey (Director Of Sales, Yellow Pages Egypt), Phil McKinnon (Head Of Marketing – North Africa, Nokia) and Mathia Nalappan (General Manager – North Africa, Nokia)

Journalists and reporters attending the Yellow Pages event

Kismet El-Sayed, Shareholder / Business Development Director, Al-Masry Al-Youm

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who attended the event and made it successful

One very interesting trend to start with is that the number of Arabic search queries super passed the English search queries for the first time on Egypt Yellow Pages. Arabic is now taking the lead with 55% of the search queries while English queries presents 45% of the total search.

Here are the top 10 searches for 2010:

1. Restaurant
2. Hotel
3. Company
4. Pharmacy
5. Bank
6. Real Estate
7. Advertising
8. Furniture
9. School
10. Factory

Restaurants are in the lead this year after switching places with hotels which comes in the second place. You can notice how consumers are searching through the site by looking for pharmacies (4th), banks (5th), furniture (8th) and schools (9th). Also increases B2B searches are noticed like company(3rd), Factory(10th), Real Estate (6th) and advertising (7th).

Most popular by category

Top Banks:

National Bank of Egypt ( El Bank El Ahly) comes first followed by HSBC then Commerical International Bank (CIB)

Top Telco Companies:

and the first places goes to… Vodafone, followed by Mobinil, then Raya and finally Etisalat in the 4th place.

Top Shipping Companies:

4 shipping companies show in the list of the top 100 searches on Yellow.com.eg, with DHL taking the lead searches, followed by Western Union, Aramex and then Fedex.

Top Car Manufacturers:

Toyota and Hyundai came on the top most searches car brands in Egypt

Top Restaurants & Cafes:

With restaurants being number one category for 2010, the top 100 most popular searches list contained 9 restaurants and cafes.

Cilantro the most popular local cafe in Egypt, followed by the restaurants Spectra which is very well known in the neighborhoods of Maadi and Mohandeseen, but it seems that nothing else can stand in the face of Egyptian cravings for fast food, you will find among the top list KFC, Cook Door, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Mo’men.

Finally Roastery, maadi and heliopolis favorite hangout comes in the list and finally La Poire, the most popular Egyptian patesserie.

Top Brands:

Many brands from consumer electronic, computer hardware industry and mobile phones where included in the list. This includes:

1. Samsung
2. Xerox
3. Sony
4. Toshiba
5. Panasonic
6. Apple
7. Nokia

Happy New Year to all Egyptians!

]]> http://mohamed-salah.com/2011/01/09/egypt-yellow-pages-2010-zeitgeist/feed/ 3 mohsalah Arabic vs English search Egyptians Most Popular Searches top banks in Egypt top telco companies in Egypt top shipping companies in Egypt top cars in Egypt top restaurants top brands in Egypt http://mohamed-salah.com/2010/08/05/dr-ahmed-darwish-signs-an-agreement-with-egypt-yellow-pages/ http://mohamed-salah.com/2010/08/05/dr-ahmed-darwish-signs-an-agreement-with-egypt-yellow-pages/#comments Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:44:24 +0000 mohsalah http://mohamed-salah.com/?p=203 ]]>

Egypt Yellow Pages has finally signed the agreement with Dr. Ahmed Darwish – Minister of Administrative Development in a big event in the ministry head quarters. The Cermony was followed by a press conference which was attended by more than 50 journalist and TV reports covering the event.

This agreement empowers Bawaba (Egypt EGov Portal) with Maps that covers different governmental service providers in Egypt, which makes it easier to reach the service provider you want in Egypt without any hassles.

The service can be accessed from http://www.egypt.gov.eg or directly from http://www.egypt.gov.eg/services/LoadxtrServices.aspx?section=citizens&PgURL=73753

Below is the coverage by Mona El Shazly in the popular talk show “Al Ashera Masa’a” on Dream TV.

Event photos

After signing the agreement

From left to right: Dr. Darwish, Marc Lambert, Hossam Ragheb and Dr. Ahmed Samir

Marc Lambert, Loula Zaklama, Nemine Seif, Mohamed Salah, Taher Ali, Aliaa Fathy

]]> http://mohamed-salah.com/2010/08/05/dr-ahmed-darwish-signs-an-agreement-with-egypt-yellow-pages/feed/ 0 mohsalah Minister Dr. Ahmed Darwish giving a speech about the partnership agreement Marc Lambert - Managing Director of Yellow Pages sign the agreement with Dr. Ahmed Samir After signing the agreement From left to right: Dr. Darwish, Marc Lambert, Hossam Ragheb and Dr. Ahmed Samir Attendees of the event http://mohamed-salah.com/2010/05/20/the-best-optimizer-is-between-your-ears/ http://mohamed-salah.com/2010/05/20/the-best-optimizer-is-between-your-ears/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 22:03:42 +0000 mohsalah http://mohamed-salah.com/?p=195 ]]> I still remember The Art of Assembly book by Randall Hyde that I read during college and his qoute

The Best Optimizer is Between Your Ears

The idea simply was revolving about the fact that if you focus too much on details and try to keep optimizing something that works really slow by just trying to get the assembly code more efficient or by using higher processing power, then you are just wasting your time… 20% or 30% performance improvement in an application that runs in 40 or 50 seconds isn’t really that much… What you should be looking at is a totally novel solution.

Well he was right, but this time the optimizer was not between my ears, it was between the ears of the people who developed the Sphinx Full Text Search Engine… Using Sphinx our team was able to make our ypanalytics tool much faster, we use this tool to analyse the user search trends and usage of Yellow Pages sites…

The tool now became 60 times faster! a mysql query that took 2 minutes to execute using an optimized mysql query now takes 2 seconds to execute using sphinx! Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the query originally took perhaps 4 or 5 minutes to execute before query optimization but still normal optimization is not enough by any means.. you just need a new solution to solve a new problem, solutions which you already know and have dealt with might not be sufficient any more…

In a huge step that will shape the Egyptian information community, the e-Government has chosen Egypt Yellow Pages to be the official partner who will provide many service to the government portal including providing information of different government  entities contact information and map locations.This is a result of the  cooperation agreement Yellow Pages signed with the Ministry of State for Administrative Development under the patronage of Prof. Dr. Ahmed Darwish, Minister of Administrative Development.

With more than 33 ministries in Egypt, it was almost impossible to get a phone number of a governmental office or organization, even if you go to the website of that ministries most probably you would find the information you are looking for and if you did it will be likely outdated. Now, not only this contact information will be available and up to date, but also maps will be displayed showing their locations and you can filter by city and area to select the one that is nearest to you.

Egypt Yellow Pages have been known very well from both consumers and businesses in Egypt as the local search provider that provides the information about any business in Egypt with a database that is growing each day to reach now more than 140,000 listings and increasing. Now having Yellow Pages create and update the full  content for the Egyptian government  is an important milestone in the history of the company, and from my opinion and without exaggeration it is an important milestone in the history of Egypt as it strengthen the link between the citizens and the government, something the government is trying to achieve but with little success so far.

The cooperation agreement also involved linking the new mapping service to applications and forms currently available in the portal. The service is currently available for over 72 services provided by the following authorities: Real Estate and Documentation Authority, the Egyptian Electricity Authority, Directorates of Education and Directorates of Health Affairs, with more government authorities to be added. You can access the government maps section by clicking here.

Click here to try out the new food delivery service in more than 380 restaurants

Here is the video report of the event:

Here are some event photos:

From left to right Mohamed Salah, Marc Lambert, Ahmed Eraqi and Walid El Saadany

Yellow Pages & Otlob.com Press Conference

Reporters at the event

Many reporters, journalists and IT Specialists attended the press conference

Navteq and Turkey Yellow Pages Partnership

Presentation by Göktuğ Okan Oğuz - General Manager of eBusiness - Turkey Yellow Pages

Press Conference of Navteq and Yellow Pages

After all,  I want to say that the big winner from this partnership is the large user base in Turkey who will benefit from combining the maps of Navteq and the data of Yellow Pages

Turkey Yellow Pages Partners with Navteq and Nokia

Turkey Yellow Pages signed a 5 year strategic deal to supply business listing information to NAVTEQ and Nokia global mapping platforms. This is the kind of partnerships that the giant mapping provider Navteq and Nokia are looking for. In these days, the mapping technologies have reached a new level, GPS became a major component in any mobile phone, not less important than a camera. Most new cars are already equipped with in-car navigation systems. Detailed maps are now available for almost anywhere in the planet. Without a detailed map a GPS would be useless.

So the equation that stood for some time was:

GPS + Detailed Maps = Know your way

Now this equation has totally changed, having access to hundreds of thousands of locations for hotels, restaurants, shops, gas stations, hospitals, …. definitely means much more. It means you do not need to worry any more about finding a place you want to go to.. All what you need is to decide what you want to do, and the where or how is not a problem anymore.

The new equations is

GPS + Detailed Maps + Business Listing Locations = Find your destination

It is so exciting now that Turkey Yellow Pages data will power up Nokia OviMaps which were offered for free a few days ago.  Nokia OviMaps is now one of the most convenient mobile maps that you could use, not only because it is free now, it’s technology has changed from raster images into vector maps so the application can be downloaded locally to your mobile from Ovi App Store, and it’s size is no more than 8 MB. This includes all the maps installed on your local mobile, no need to keep downloading images from the internet.

Back in late 2006, when we developed our Nokia Mobile Search plug-in for Egypt, UAE and KSA Yellow Pages we were so delighted about it, it was a breakthrough for the use of the mobiles in our daily life to find a restaurant or a hotel on the move. One and half years later Nokia decided to drop support for their Mobile Search applications. Their insights were toward mobile maps. Now here comes OviMaps, the new amazing free Nokia mobile mapping platform and again powered by Yellow Pages, the most trusted local search provider as always.

So stay tuned for the upcoming updates from OviMaps which Turkey Yellow Pages will power up its data soon…

]]> http://mohamed-salah.com/2010/01/27/turkey-yellow-pages-partners-with-navteq-and-nokia/feed/ 1 mohsalah Turkey Yellow Pages Partners with Navteq and Nokia Nokia Mobile Search Nokia Ovi Maps http://mohamed-salah.com/2009/12/28/egypt-yellow-pages-year-2009-wrap-up/ http://mohamed-salah.com/2009/12/28/egypt-yellow-pages-year-2009-wrap-up/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2009 10:17:00 +0000 mohsalah http://mohamed-salah.com/?p=105 ]]> Another year has come and gone, i’m taking a moment here to look back at what happened in 2009, what people want in Egypt, what they are looking for and interested in.

Saying goodbye to 2009 and welcome to 2010, this is what people are interested in

Top 10 searches in www.yellow.com.eg during 2009

Hotels remain in number 1 like 2008, Restaurants jump from 4th position to second position, Schools comes in the third place while Banks drop 2 places to be in the 4th place.

Cars move out from the top 10 and Pharmacies enter in the 10th position.

Most popular businesses in www.yellow.com.eg during 2009

As for the businesses, HP retains its first place for the second year, DHL and Western Union comes in second and third places. Followed by Telco companies Vodafone and Raya, as for banks CIB jumps this year above HSBC, and finally cafes and fast food restaurants appear for the first time in the top 10 list: Cilantro, KFC followed by Pizza Hut in the 10th place.

Prefered visitor language for www.yellow.com.eg in 2009

One more interesting fact is that Arabic version of www.yellow.com.eg is getting more attention, usage has increased from 40% in 2008 to 45.8% in 2009 almost reaching the English. This is a direct result of enhancing the arabic search logic which now produces better and much more relevant results.

2009 was just a great year for Egypt Yellow Pages. 2010 will hopefully be even better, we will keep doing our best to serve our visitors and enhance their experience.

Merry Xmas and Happy new year to everyone