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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Of course I haven't used (and for that matter not sure I've seen) a white pages in years. But yellow pages can still be somewhat useful for finding local services of various types. A lot of local service businesses are still pretty bad about online presences.

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Yellow Pages may have been good for finding local services of various types, but it was also useful for retrieving the entire password database for offline inspection. Sun eventually improved their online presence and security, and renamed Yellow Pages to Network Information Services after losing a lawsuit by British Telecom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Information_Service

Jordan Hubbard has YP to thank for the infamous "rwall incident" of 1987:

https://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard

Where I live (Denmark), nobody makes any phonebooks anymore. I believe the last time I used one was in 2003.

I'm not sure white pages are still printed in the US, but I do get a yellow pages delivered every year.

I've not seen a phone book since moving to Norway, and just realized it after reading your comment. In the states, I'd get at least one every year - sometimes two - and it didn't matter if I wanted one or not. I honestly think they print them because businesses pay to be in them.

>I honestly think they print them because businesses pay to be in them

Well, sure. That's what the yellow pages basically are--advertising for local businesses. (There may be some level of listing that's free. I don't know.) As other have noted, my local yellow pages is pretty small and thin these days though with the caveat that I don't live in a city. I suspect that a listing/ad is no longer quite the requirement for local businesses that it once was.

In the United States it’s still a law in many states that landline providers are required to provide a printed white pages, which they subsidize with yellow pages (ads). It’s a legal anachronism.

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