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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Try looking for some business with Google, and then a Yellow Pages search engine (like the Canadian one: yellowpages.ca).

Dig through reams of spam, irrelevant references, review sites with misleading info, and non-local results? or scroll through nothing but business names and links?

No contest.

Just to find the opening hours of some business can be a hassle with a search engine.

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Did you actually try this? I just searched for a Vancouver business, the name of which I'm not exactly sure of, to find the hours. The yellowpages site didn't find the business at all but it was the first result in Google with direct links to their website, a map, and the closing time was listed right in the search results. It turns out I did get the business name slightly wrong.

Ironically, the 4th link on the page was a link to that business on yellowpages.ca -- so they did have a listing but I couldn't find it by seaching there.

Google is the one tool to do everything and it does things more than well enough that sites like yellowpages.ca are pretty irrelevant.

I've found the business metadata (hours of operation, address, etc) that Google puts into the search results extremely unhelpful. The hours of operation and phone number, in particular, are very rarely correct for me. Most of the time, the address will be correct, but not always (when I search for my doctor's practice, the address is listed as 'Blvd.').

...but even with that, I'm still not going to yellopages.com. I'll just search for it and get it directly from their website.

This info is usually self-reported by the business. If they don't have someone assigned to the job of making sure Google is up to date with their hours, it often won't happen. My company (a small web host that works with mostly local businesses) has a Google specialist whose job is about 70% keeping our client's metadata up to date with Google.

> I'll just search for it and get it directly from their website.

Ah, but not all businesses have a website though. Of those that do, not all have a website that is ranked on the first page of a Google result.

Ahead of the real thing are spam pages with junk info, many of which are deliberately designed to look as if they might be the official website.

Things may have changed recently, but online YP searches have typically been just as frustrating. Most of the time, the top search results are paid promotions nowhere near me and sometimes not even relevant to my search.

I love when you do a search for a service (like a Plumber) "in your area" and the first result is some bozo who paid extra for higher listings but is 100 miles away. And of course the ad doesn't tell you where he is, so you get to call and find out that they aren't going to drive that far to fix a leak.

What's funny about your comment is that yellow pages uses google search and maps to compile it's results. Why not skip the cruft and go right to the original source?

I just did two identical searches in google.com and yp.com, and the results I got on yp were entirely different than those on google, and more numerous.

yp.com has a ton of listings directly submitted to them. They may use Google as one of many data sources, but they're by no means the original source.

This is one way YP.com is transitioning to more online marketing. They have started to bundle their yp.com offerings with their print offerings.

If you buy a print ad, you can get a cut on the .com ad and placement depending on how much you're spending. I also noticed yp.com has the first 8-10 listings are paid ads, which go right below the fold. If you don't scroll down, you'd never notice the non-paid listings.

It's pretty sketchy to me, but I guess they're doing what they have to in order to survive

That's actually the opposite direction of where they're moving. yp.com has little, if any, relation to the print business.

Which yellow pages where? Yellow pages isn't a specific company; it's a kind of floating trademark that exists in different ways in different countries and regions. My comment was specifically about yellowpages.ca that I have here in Canada.

> Why not skip the cruft and go right to the original source?

That depends on whether the compiling that you're skipping provides value. Why skip the gas station cruft and refine your own crude oil to make gasoline? Hey, no road tax!

Aside, that's not true, in many jurisdictions. US tax authorities chase down and collect money from biodiesel users who don't pay the fueltax.

How do they do that? It seems you would have to ask all vehicle owners to submit their fuel receipts and odometer readings.

That might be an apt description of 3rd tier clickbait 'yellowpages' sites. But the more prominent ones spend large sums of money buying and aggregating data feeds.

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