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Previous: South African emergency sign | Main | Next: PC CD trays
July 1, 2004 12:01 AM
Broken: Verizon online phone book
Charles Wasilewski points out that after searching Verizon's Yellow Pages for a business, you get the business's address. But you have to click on "phone" in order to view the phone number. How hard would it be to display the phone number along with the business address?
I believe they get paid an additional advertising fee for each "click through" and if they showed the number up front, there would be no way to track this.
It's not that they get paid directly for the extra-clickthrough. It's that it gives them an additional page view for their ads. That one bit of information is the thing people want so it guarantees an extra page-view.
Or, maybe they don't want a crawler to have easy access to slurp up all their precious little phone numbers.
The most annoying "feature" is the listing of national advertisers first; always in front of local listings or advertisers. If one has a local business there is no way to move up the list since the nationals spend more money and as a consumer I have to search further for local listings.
Further unless the business I am looking for has paid an additional fee they will not appear in the initial search unless the exact city of the listing is selected, sometimes difficult in larger metro areas. Another way to bleed more money from those who advertise.
My understanding is that this additional link prevents web spiders from looking up hundreds of telephone numbers with just one search. The extra step is making it harder for people to spam your email addresses and telephone numbers. I'll gladly take the extra step.
A bigger problem than having to make an extra click to get the phone number is the difficulites faced by blind people who are trying to find the button to click in the first place. What is needed is a computer monitor that has a Braille output, where the screen becomes raised into a series of little bumps so it can be read by the blind. This is not much different than the Braille on the keypads found at drive up ATM machines, which can be found by a blind person who is driving on a road that has Braille bumps embedded in its surface.
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Previous: South African emergency sign | Main | Next: PC CD trays
I noticed Anywho doing this too. What the hell is the point of that? Isn't anyone searching for phone numbers going to want the phone number BY DEFAULT?
Posted by: Grey Hodge at July 1, 2004 03:30 AM