Internet ushers “sushi” into Yellow Pages  |  June 4, 2007  

Long live the Yellow Pages. Even in an age when seemingly all information is online, the stodgy old construction of dead trees that lands on your doorstep once a year is still a valuable businesses and services guide.

When my older daughter announced recently that she would like a karaoke theme for her upcoming birthday party I turned, quite naturally, to Google. “Karaoke rental” I typed. And got nowhere, or, more accurately, I got everywhere: despite ticking the “pages from Canada” box and later adding my city to the search, I still landed a lot of useless results. One hit fairly high on the list was Goodtime Disc Jockeys in San Francisco. That's not primarily a rental service, and in any case San Fran is too far to travel, even for my daughter.

So after 20 minutes of wasted effort, I turned to the Yellow Pages. I found “Karaoke Machines—rentals, sales and service” immediately, spied a local place, called and reserved the gear I wanted. Total time: three minutes.

My conclusion from this and other experiences is that the old phone book often beats the 'net for category and/or geographic searches. So I welcomed the news that Yellow Pages is updating its listings to reflect changing consumer interest. Banished categories include Box Lunches, Typesetting Machines, Videotex Services and Teletypewriter Communication; in are Home Theatre System, Payday Loans, Scrapbooking and Sushi. See this press release for more. http://www.ypg.com/page.php/en/1/265.html

An interesting note here is that many of these decisions are driven by searches conducted at www.yellowpages.ca. Sushi, for example, gets it own listing simply because many people searched for it online.

So while the old-technology paper Yellow Pages often beats out the upstart Internet, it's nice to see the online world giving back to its database predecessor.

Peter Wolchak