Over the years I have been thoroughly unimpressed with Yellowpages.com for local search, yet in a display of cognitive dissonance I keep using them when I need to find a local business. Almost every time I give up and Google, which itself is okay but not great for local search. The yellowpages.com categories are confusing, their notion of local doesn’t map to mine (they returned South El Monte for something… that’s LA), the reviews are practically non-existent, and the interface is confusing.

So yesterday I need to find an appliance parts store and after yet another frustrating experience with yellowpages.com, I ended up googling and by chance found local search engine YellowBot.com. What a pleasant surprise.

The interface is smart, using tags and skipping categorization altogether while instead relying on good search. I searched on a couple of different business types and in each case the list of returned items was pretty damn good. The review data is spotty but that’s not surprising, it looks early stage, but in some categories it’s not bad. I have two standard searches that I use to test local search, “pizza” and “car wash” and in each case I was impressed with the results.

I haven’t tried the mobile version yet but suspect it will be similarly useful.