You know what I miss?
Phone books.
The ones that used to arrive annually on your front porch with actual paper where you could look up a person or a business like looking up a word in the dictionary.
1/x
To game the phone book, you actually had to name your business "AAAA Best Chinese Takeaway."
You could by ad space in the yellow pages of course. But there was always the "blue pages" where actual businesses in your actual area were listed without embellishment.
2/x
Now, when I want to find some service (say I want someone to fix my kitchen stove), I have to "Google" it, and I get a shit-ton of irrelevant stuff for "businesses" that are half way across the country.
3/x
It matters not what search engine. I get the same drivel when I "duck-duck" it or whatever. They're all gamed for showing me the Angie's Lists and TripAdvisors and secondary search engine things, with zero chance of the person 3 miles from here who knows zero about SEO showing up before page 300 of the results.
4/x
Meanwhile, if I try to use an actual online phonebook -- say whitepages-dot-com -- I get a lookup that tells me "yes, we know that business, but you have to subscribe [or pay per view or whatever] before we'll let you know how to contact them."
6/x
I get that access to actual, helpful information has actual costs.
But somewhere the line has been crossed between the cost of freely available access to the commons kinds of things that are the basis of a healthy society, and the commercial interests of information brokers.
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