Sat, 01 Jan 2005

Why is Telstra so bad at the directory business?

I frequently go to the on-line White Pages or Yellow Pages for the obvious reasons. But—for reasons which are completely incomprehensible to me—it seems to be a waste of time. Today, for instance, the White Pages could not find an entry that I had typed in exactly as it appears in the printed White Pages. And, after wasting ten minutes with the Yellow Pages looking for the same business, I eventually walked to the other end of the house and picked up the printed directories.

It has been my experience in general that it’s quicker to walk around and find the paper version, page through it and find the information I want. That’s utterly absurd. Even more absurd is the fact that, as a test, I tried looking for the same phone number with Google and had the answer in a few seconds. Telstra have nothing like the amount of data that Google have. In fact, I could provide Telstra with a faster application based on flat text files and grep. What are they doing there?

Posted at: 13:59

Path: /technology   |  permalink