From Legal Andrew

No more yellow pages

I keep trying to convince my wife that we can throw out the paper phone books. With Google Maps and its awesome local results, yellow pages are simply obsolete.

Why should I dig out a huge book and thumb through the pages looking for the crazy category that somebody decided to stick the business in? I can just type a keyword and zip code in Google (like “cafe 22407″) and find exactly what I want.

As one search industry expert wrote,

My gut feeling is that the Google Trends graph for searches for “yellow pages” is likely representative of a broad behavioral pattern of Internet users who are going to traditional Yellow Pages sites less and less. If we project the pattern out in time, we can see that searches for “yellow pages” might reduce down to nil by as soon as 2011

What are local businesses to do?