To Google or not to Google

Given a choice between going for a printed book vs electronic, I'm the type of guy that would go for the electronic version, every time! Well, that's what I thought until I arrived home & found the water heater had stopped working on a cold winter day! The first thing I did was go online (of course) & do a search on Google for plumbers in Temecula. I got results, the issue is that I got just over 440,000 results. Now, Temecula has just a tad over 110,000 residents and I'm pretty sure they aren't all plumbers and even if they were, it still doesn't explain away the other 330,000!

Trying to deal with the overload, I resolved to stick to page 1 of Google & started clicking links, waiting for pages to load & reading through reviews, following links and reading pages and pages of information. After about 10 minutes of that, I stopped & did a sanity check. Right then, my wife walked into the room & asked if I'd phoned the plumber yet. My terse response was that I'm still looking for one, to which she replied "Why don't you just use the Yellow Pages?". I was about to launch into a whole oral dissertation on the merits of local online search, saving the trees from certain paper-death, but looking at her face, thought it best to just go get the book.

Needless to say, about 1 minute later I was on the phone with a plumber that worked after hours, was accredited, accepted credit cards, in business for over 25 years & already on his way to my house.

Trying to use Google vs Yellow Pages when searching for something like a plumber, or other service that you need, there's just no comparison. Seriously, think about it, you can't instantly compare companies on Google like you can with the Yellow Pages. I'm not just talking about the physical book, you can get a 100% Yellow Pages book look & feel online (of course Yellow Magic developed the software)! Just go here & take a look: http://www.completephonebook.com/ You literally get the best of both worlds, if only one of my local directory publishers had an online directory like this, it would have solved my problem immediately.

If you prefer the Google-look, but want to avoid wading through 440,000+ results for a plumber, check out an example of our "MagicCarpet Lite" pages on http://www.yellowmagic.com/guia You get all the relevant results, maps, comparisons, plus links to all the display ads at the click of a button. For Firefox & IE browsers, you can even replace the default search bar to go directly to your site! For those of us that are more inclined to use their mobile phones, the answer is "MagicCarpet Mobile". Go to http://www.yellowmobimagic.com/tem09 using your phone's browser & type 'yellow' as the name search term to see the full range of listing features.

Oh, by the way, even if your users do go to Google, our search-engine-optimized online directories can give you first-page results on Google & then pull them straight back into your online directory.