The iconic Canadian White Pages which contains listings of residential telephone numbers in various locations across Canada was first delivered in 1879. It is consequently now over a hundred and thirty years old.

Over the years, updated versions of this publication were periodically delivered to residents. According to Marc P. Tellier President and CEO of Yellow Pages group, the White Pages have become more or less redundant, especially in urban areas, as people make use of online services such as Canada411 and YellowPages.ca to find out the phone numbers they need.

In 2005, it was decide to send the white pages at a two yearly interval, and interested parties could request a copy in the in between year. The demand was practically nil.

It has thus been decided to discontinue the practice of delivering the Canadian White pages in future in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Quebec City, Montreal Edmonton and Calgary.

Residents who are still interested in receiving the White Pages can specifically make a request to have a copy of it delivered to them.

There have been concerns that the discontinuation of this service will affect the elderly and poorer sections of society, who do not have access to computers or mobile phones.

Along with the search results for most location-specific queries, Google provides this list of geo-specific search results, which they determine from the keywords in the query and the geographic location of the searcher.

Local Business Results on Google Web Search

The local business results within the universal search results are quite extensive and inclusive. Earlier, they used to appear only when the user included a specific location in his query, but for some time now, Google provides these local business results even for queries without a specific local qualification to the keyword if the query is deemed to be typically meant for localised searches, such as “nearest pizza”.

This universal search result includes detailed information about the businesses in the given location, including phone numbers and direct links to the website.

Due to this addition, the number of referrals to Internet directory services has shown a marked downward trend.

A study of the progress graph of various internet yellow pages, including those in the U.K., Canada and Australia, shows this downward trend.

Decline in percentage visits from search engines

The graph above charts the percentage of visits to the leading UK directory assistance services’ websites that came from a search engine. Over the past 3 months, most of these services have seen a fall of 1% to 8% in the percentage of traffic being referred from search.

While this is bad for these local directories, it is certainly a great convenience for Google’s users, as they do not need to go from one page to another, to find answers to their queries.

It is, of course, possible for these directory assistance sites to fight back, if they are innovative and put in a lot more effort. In fact, some directory services such as Yelp, Zillow and ServiceMagic have managed to maintain steady growth internationally in spite of Google’s onslaught.