pagesjaunes.fr: the new way to find (well, the fat way)
Another victory of the French IT representation: Pages Jaunes launched its new web site, more modern and all. Apparently, what they’re trying to say is that they can find other things than just phone numbers, and it should be easier now.
But have they looked at recent (or less recent even) pages done for searching and just searching? Google’s (basic) homepage is less than 20kB. live.com’s homepage is 30kB. The new pagesjaunes.fr homepage is weighting 200kB and I’m not even counting the flash animations. There’s almost 110kB of javascript? Oh, sure, I can see that this is well documented (and in French, nonetheless), but is this really necessary on a production homepage?
What can we find on this homepage? Two search fields (well, ok). Three Ads (two in flash) and some random informations (well, not really informations, just a flash animation for searching things about cities, oh well…). All of this for more than 200kB. Some would argue that for example Yahoo!‘s homepage weight more than 300kB. But two things have be taken into account for this: first, there’s content. Two, Yahoo! can afford it. Why? Because they have large pipes, redundancy and compute power. It took me probably less than a second to load the full homepage on a modern computer and with a decent connection, even though my cache was empty. On the other side, I tried 2 or 3 times to load pagesjaunes.fr when it took more than 20 seconds to display anything.
And don’t you tell me about the announcement-effect or I’ll hurt a baby rabbit.
I think Google will become my first choice for finding business numbers, even though the local informations for France are still pretty rare.