By: Charles Bowen Finding Addresses, Telephone Numbers Online Gets Upgrade
Good, dependable online telephone directories have been
surprisingly slow to come to cyberspace. Sure, electronic white
pages and yellow pages have been online since the mid-1990s.
However, most of these early efforts seemed more interested in
the promise of the technology than in the follow-through. Often
there have been huge gaps in the coverage - entire states
missing or at least only sparsely represented in the databases
- and too frequently the listings were badly out-of-date.
Some directory services tried to make up for their shortcomings
by adding interesting extras. Links to maps and directions have
been common, along with icons to let you automatically dial a
number you found or to send that person a card or flowers. Many
have expanded their offerings to including e-mail addresses and
Web page directories, too.
While these fun add-ons have been great, the basic information
- telephone numbers and addresses for the nation - too
often was not reliable enough for working journalists to count
on. That could be changing.
Despite its flippant name, AT&T Corp.'s AnyWho may be the online
directory we've been looking for. AnyWho:
o Connects with more than 90 million consumer listings and some
10 million businesses.
o Doesn't force us, like some other directories, to perform
searches across multiple directories to find traditional and
enhanced business listing information. All contact information is
combined into a single listing.
o Lets you search by various criteria, including business
category, name, city, and state.
o Has a powerful reverse lookup option to find people and
business based on a phone number or even a partial phone number.
Listings also promise to be a little more reliable. Toll-free
change authentication is meant to assure businesses that only
they can change their online listing data. Business listings can
be enhanced with Web site URLs (uniform resource locators), e-
mail addresses, facsimile
and toll-free phone numbers.
To use the service, visit the site at http://www.anywho.com, where a
form on the introductory page gets right down to business,
letting you search for either a person or a company by filling in
all or some of the blanks. For more searching power, click the
"Advanced Search" link at the bottom of either the "Find a
Person" or "Find a Business" form. The next screen expands the
search forms, giving you options such as "Sounds Like" and
"Begins With" to enhance the terms you enter.
"Advanced Search" also enables you to broaden the hunt for the
person or business to as much as a 10-mile radius of the address
or ZIP code you enter. A tab on top of the directory site enables
you to search yellow pages, the best way to find a business when
you don't have a particular company in mind. It is set up in a
hierarchy that gets more specific as you click on each link.
Other tabs along the top of the display let you search toll-free
numbers, e-mail addresses, Web sites, and even a local events
calendar.
Other considerations in using AnyWho for your writing and
editing:
o In searching the directory of businesses, remember words like
"service," "office," "department," and "center" often are
abbreviated. If you spell out the word, your search won't match
the abbreviated entries. Consider leaving these words out when
entering keywords.
o If you're having trouble locating an entry using only a street
name, try looking by name for a person you know to be on the same
street. If you can find something else on that street, you then
can click the hyperlinked street name in the output to display
other entries on that street.
o You also can search in the telephone number field for "vanity
numbers," such as 1-800-EAT-SMRT. Any letters you specify in the
field are converted into their dial-pad numeric counterparts, so
a Q becomes 7, a Z becomes 9, etc.
---
Bowen writes columns, articles and books from West Virginia, and is host of the daily Internet News syndicated radio show (http://www.netnewstoday.com).
charlesbowen@compuserve.com
Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher
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