Dex, the newly named Yellow Pages unit (formerly of Qwest/US West), announced Friday they have made all 240,000 of their listings – covering a major swath of the midwestern and western US – searchable online. Said Dex President and Chief Executive Officer George Burnett, rather defensively, “We think our product is better than any portal.”
MediaPost has a story on it here.
the really annoying commercial for Dex was on last night, and my girlfriend, perhaps only spending half of her attention on it, wondered what the hell dex was (before the end of the commercial showed an image of the old giant book with a yellow cover). So I explained that the yellow pages suck, and instead of fixing them, Qwest just gave it a new name.
Online listings are fine, but there are plenty of crappy yellow pages websites with just names, addresses and phone numbers.
Dexonline seems to offer more:
One thing I’d like them to do is clean up their URLs. Endless strings of ?attr=value&attr=value&… are unclear and can be worked around in several time-tested ways.