Keeping Up With the Yellow Pages

The problem with the yellow pages in the past has always been accuracy. Based on no fault of their own, the phone directory always had a hard time keeping up with the multitude of changes that would sweep through the business world over night. Businesses tend to go out, open up and change hours and sometimes those changes happen unexpectedly and aren’t reflected in any kind of timely manner in the traditional printed yellow pages because they are only printed once a year.

This limitation changed as times evolved and the ability provide information in a more real world time line changed with technology. So as more consumers go electronic in their searches for telephone numbers and business names, the yellow pages have also gone electronic. Electronic yellow pages have remained a popular search engine tool because they allow consumers to find information that is updated in real time while maintaining the tradition that most of us grew up with, namely finding information through this popular search directory.

This format change has allowed the consumer directory to update and to reflect the changes in hours, phone numbers, address and reflect if the business is still even a current business and provide customers this information in real time, that wasn’t available before.

There are a lot of search engines available to find a particular business but if you want to find a category of businesses and then narrow in on one particular business, the phone directory is still the best route to find that information in one easy convenient location.

If you prefer the paper version of the directory that is still a viable option as well. And it is still distributed for free, just as it always has been by the major telephone carriers to their clients. Very little has actually changed with the printed version since it was first successfully launched in 1883.

The original yellow pages which began to be officially printed in 1883 to meet the demand of the almost three hundred commercial businesses with phones in Chicago, Illinois is still being printed today, much as it was then.

The only difference between the original pages and today's version is the color of paper. The original pages actually were white but the publisher ran out of white paper and had yellow paper in stock and so they finished up the job with that color. And the name and color stuck so much that even more than a hundred years later we are still referring to the phone directory by that name.

And even now, with cell phones the dominate mode of communication, and most house lines defunct, we use the phone directory to locate businesses and people. Some habits are just slow to change or die out and using the phone book is definitely a habit that has endured multiple generations and will likely continue to be a cornerstone of our culture for generations to come.