Did you know you can still get printed Yellow pages from Bell Canada? I just got mine. I figure it’ll be easier finding services that are actually local instead of sifting through ones that are in #Danforth Illinois or in #Riverdale from Archy cartoons that pop up in web searches.
@ericatty@failedLyndonLaRouchite@maegul@stux when I first found out about the fedi.directory and fediverse.info I was thinking, wow are we headed back to the white pages and yellow pages again? Or maybe we’re revisiting the Yahoo directory years?
The Yellow Pages had one hell of a run! I wish I had saved some old ones. They were like time capsules of what your local community was on any given year. They took up so much space that you couldn’t wait to throw out the old ones, but yet if you found a really old one, it was hard not to spend the next hour just flipping through it.
In 1998, two Stanford kids published a paper in Computer Networks: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Other apologetics: "just call the restaurant rather than using its website." Look, I know the people who say this don't think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a #YellowPages, but it's hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don't just set up fake websites for your local businesses - they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.