The Internet is my Yellow Pages

I threw away (recycled) my phone books yesterday. I’ve been living in this house for 9 months and have had phone books lying by my front door 2-3 different times. I don’t need them. First of all I don’t have a “land line” phone and haven’t had one in 8 years. I assume they just deliver phone books to every house in the neighborhood. But, since I don’t have a use for a phone book, I think it’s a bit wasteful for them to keep giving them to me. If I need to find a phone number for something local I use the Internet. If I need to find the number for pizza delivery in my neighborhood, I use the Internet. As a matter of fact I can’t think of anything that’s in the yellow pages that I can’t find on the Internet and just as fast. Am I the only one that thinks printed phone books are useless for a large portion of USA?

I’m sure most of you know this already but here are a few useful tips for finding phone book type listings on the Internet:

1. Personal phone numbers are easy to find with google, all you need to do is put in the name of the person followed by a comma and the city or state they live in. In most cases you can get the address the same way.
2. Local pizza delivery can be found in a couple of different ways. If you have a favorite pizza company, then just go to their website and plug in your zip code. If you’re in a larger city you can use google and just type “pizza delivery, your zip code” and you should get some results. Additionally you can go to yellowpages.com and search. However, I’ve found that yellowpages.com doesn’t have all the listings that they should because they charge extra, or at least they use to.
3. If you’re looking for a local business of a specific type (ie. Art gallery, bar, restaurant) you can, again just go to google and type in the type of business and your zip code or city name and you should get some results. Even the paid listing in google are useful at times. Additionally, for food, beverage and cultural type listings I like to use the online version of my local weekley paper. In my case that’s austinchronicle.com. I can always get good recommendation for restaurants and bars, in addition to finding local music listings. I would recommend using your local weekly as much as you can.

Like I said before, you can find anything on the Internet that you can find in your phone book. This is why it’s important for business owners to have a “quality” web presence and to spend just a little time on online marketing. If you don’t have a website then, you’re missing out on potential customers that would not find you otherwise.
If you have some tips or sources for finding local business’ then post them in the comments.

technorati tags: google, yellow pages, phone book