When it comes to tracking down business information -the address or phone number of a business in the same state or maybe across the country- the World Wide Web is becoming a national telephone directory.
Let's say you want to find out about record stores in Los Angeles or cyber-cafes in Seattle, but you happen to live in Austin, Texas. Where do you turn? Maybe you could head down to the local library or order one of those CD-ROM's that have 16 billion addresses.
If those options don't sound too appealing, then your next stop should be the Web. Here you'll find dozens of sites that let your mouse do the walking.
Yahoo! Yellow Pages (http://yp.yahoo.com/yp/yyt?HF=ytown&;F=yyt). The Yahoo Yellow Pages is a excellent resource for getting localized information on all sorts of businesses and even civic organizations in your community or city. All you have to do is type in a Zip Code or the name of any locality in a search field, use a scrollbar to highlight the state your interested in and submit the data. It's that simple. The database program will then go out and retrieve information about businesses that you're looking for and return it in an index format. There's even a map to show the street location of the business.
Big Book (http://www.bigbook.com/) This site claims 16 million businesses around the country and provides street-level maps, third-party reviews and customer ratings. There is a simple search field where you write in the name of the exact business or type of business, along with city and state information. You don't even have to fill in all of the search fields to get useful results. For example, I typed record stores in the category search field, then Los Angeles for the city, and used the postal abbreviation CA. for California. The search returned more than 200 record stores, and if those stores had home pages, I could also link to them.
Big Yellow (http://s15.bigyellow.com/) This Web site boasts 16.5 million business listings from across the United States. There are a few ways to search for what your looking for, such as by state, business category, business name and location. I decided to check out barber shops in Arizona. I typed in barber shop in the search category field, chose Arizona for a state, Phoenix as the city and 602 as the area code. The search returned 121 similar business types. It then offered me the chance to refine my search still more to barber schools, barbers and hair goods products.
American Yellow Pages (http://www.abii.com/lookupusa/ayp/aypsrch.htm) Let's say that you need to find businesses in Salt Lake City, Utah that sell used computer equipment. Here is all you have to do. In the initial search field, type in computers. For my search, a list of 21 choices appeared that included the keyword computers. Highlight the choice closest to your request and press continue. Then type in a city and state. In this case, Salt Lake City and Utah, then hit the search icon. I was then provided a handy list of used computer stores. It's that easy.
The wide variety of business and telephone directories available on the Internet and World Wide Web is making searching and finding what you're looking for as easy as click...click...click. |
