Could One of Our Oldest Habits Be Close to Extinction?

Times are changing, and technology is blazing forward at an astronomical pace. So fast, that our behavior as a society is changing along with it quite rapidly. One of our country’s oldest reference manuals could be headed for the mothball treatment… the Yellow Book.

The big fat Yellow Book has been the mainstay of our soiciety. When we wanted pizza, we dug out the Yellow Book. It stayed in the kitchen, close to the phone. Back in the days of my youth, all phones came from the telephone company. It was a monopoly. Telephone brands and variety did not exist. You had 2 choices… a wall-mounted phone, or a table-top version. About the only exiting thing that came along for a while was the advent of the “extra-long” cord. With this great invention, teens could go around the corner and take their private conversations into the next room without everyone in the kitchen or family room hearing any of the juicy details. But with this “tethered” phone, we also had a tethered Yellow Book. My mother used to attach a string to the book, and tape it to the phone so it wouldn’t be misplaced.

Years later, after the arrival of cordless phones and even “cellular” phones, the Yellow Book was still the staple for searching out local stores for needed goods and services. It’s hard to believe that the internet didn’t even jump on the scene until 1994, which was four years after I graduated college. This marked the beginning for numbering the days of the Yellow Book’s livelyhood.

What shocks me is the fact that it took another fourteen or so years for yet another innovation (other than the Internet itself) to seriously challenge and threaten the kingmanship of the Yellow Book. What was it, you ask? It was Google Local Search.

What took so long for the Internet to threaten the Yellow Book? Simple… typing in a search for “pizza” in Jefferson City, Missouri, would bring results for restaurants in Cleveland Ohio. Even if you typed “pizza” along with your home town and state, the results were still shoddy. This made searching out local services on the net just about worthless… until Google Local Search came along, that is!

The brainy nerds at Google headquarters spent years working on this problem, and came up with the local search system. Even if I type in “pizza” without “Jefferson City Missouri”, I will STILL get a section on page one that is labeled “Local business results for pizza near Jefferson City, MO”. Under that heading, about 10 pizza places are shown ranked by letters “a, b, c, d, e…” along with the business name, phone number, and even a corresponding map to the left side with a pinpoint of each letter to match the result!

What does this mean for the Yellow Book? It means it’s time to get the mothballs out and retire them. With this search feature, why even go to yellowbook.com to search for businesses when you can get them straight from Google with this degree of accuracy? There isn’t. Add to that the fact that we as a society have turned the name “Google” into a verb, which means “to search out on the internet”, and you can just about hang it up! Children, teens, and  adults are using the verb “Google” almost unconsciously now. You even see it on TV, and hear it on the radio… “just Google us for directions to our store, and for our website!” they say. It represents one of the finest examples of branding and name recognition ever created. When your brand name becomes a commonly used verb, you are guaranteed to be a smashing success.

All this spells trouble for the Yellow Book and the Yellow Pages, who both charge some fairly pricey fees for local businesses to advertise in them. Soon, the big thick newsprint version of the Yellow books will turn into a “Stonehenge” of sorts, for advertising media anyway. But what will be most interesting to watch will be the length of time it takes for the big law firms and car dealerships to figure out that people are “Googling” their competitors instead of finding their own companies in the ancient Stonehenge media guide.

Time will only tell.

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