Yahoo's yellow pages flopped big time today.
I used it to find a local business. The number was right, and so I sent my wife to the address, using the handy map link.
Wrong.
They moved some time ago. Many miles away. I am in deep doo-doo; ergo so is Yahoo.
From a systems perspective, this is a fundamental problem with a 'mostly correct' solution. Google's algorithmically constructed local search service is even less reliable, but ironically that's not a problem. It's easy to discover that Google's data is stale; so I've never trusted it the way I used to trust Yahoo.
Yahoo's listings have a corporate feel, as though they were updated, validated and maintained. They probably are, but I suspect the paper yellow page listings are still substantially more accurate -- if only because businesses aggressively maintain their paper listings.
Sigh. I hate the paper yellow pages, but maybe I'm stuck with them again. Certainly I can't trust Yahoo's directory service, and the cost of validating what I find may push me back to a solution I thought was dead 10 years ago.
