Electronic Yellow Pages

Electronic Yellow Pages are online versions of traditional printed business directories produced by telephone companies around the world. Typical functionalities of online yellow pages include the alphabetical listings of businesses and search functionality of the business database by name, business or location. Since Electronic Yellow Pages are not limited by space considerations, they often contain far more comprehensive business information such as vicinity maps, company profiles, product information, and more.

An advantage of Electronic Yellow Pages is that they can be updated in real time; therefore, listed businesses are not constrained by once-a-year publishing of the printed version which leads to greater accuracy of the listings since contact information may change at any time.

Before the popularity of the internet, business telephone numbers in the United Kingdom could be searched by accessing a remote computer terminal by modem. The initial prototype of this was superseded in 1990 with a commercial service. This service allowed searches via Name, Business classification and locality for business listings and a free text field was provided to allow "unstructured text" searching of Adverts. This dialup service was available via Prestel and "BT Gold" services. The service Electronic Yellow Pages was superseded in the mid-1990s by the internet service www.yell.com. A similar system called Phonebase for published residential phone numbers was discontinued in the 1990s, being superseded a web-based search interface.

The first true online Yellow Pages, was a creation based on the independent YP publisher in Seattle, Washington called Banana Pages. This was the first print directory which was registered with both YPPA (the Yellow Pages Publishers Association), and the ADP (Association of Directory Publishers) to place their listings online. The Yellow Pages product was the brain child of the co-owner brothers of the company, Peter and John Richards. Many RBOCS (Regional Bell Operating Companies) would follow. Banana Pages eventually became YPI (Yellow Pages on the Internet, Inc) which was sold to InfoSpace.com and became their Yellow Pages offering to cobrands.

Among the first to place their listings on the Web was Pacific Bell's now-defunct “At Hand” online yellow pages that was officially launched on August 30, 1996. At Hand debuted with approximately 1.2 million merchant listings from across California. At the time, the service was competing with BigBook.com, a nationwide Web directory that was since absorbed by SuperPages.

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