Information Please! When 411, Phone Book Just Won’t Do

Have you ever wondered what happened to an old friend? Perhaps you’re planning a class reunion or searching for a lost relative or trying to locate someone who owes you money. Or maybe you want to target-market companies in your city, state or across the United States and Canada.

Most likely, you call directory information when you’re trying to find someone’s telephone number or address. But that gets expensive, and if you don’t know the city where the person or business is located, you’re probably out of luck.

There are now several efficient alternatives to printed phone books and 411. First, there are the various online directories on the Internet. They fall into two categories: Bell telephone company sites and third-party sites. The phone company sites generally are more accurate, but the third-party sites often have a broader geographic reach.

You can get a complete list of Internet directory sites at https://www.yahoo.com/Reference/Directories/. The most useful directory sites I found are WhoWhere? (https://www.whowhere.com Switchboard (https://www.switchboard.com) and Four 11 (https://www.four11.com).

But there is an inherent problem with online directories: You must access the Internet to use them. If you’re not online, you can opt for a CD-ROM directory.

Two companies dominate the CD-ROM directory industry: American Business Information (which now owns Digital Directory Assistance) and ProCD. The companies offer a set of CD-ROMs containing white and yellow page directories for the U.S., as well as a variety of other products based on the electronic phone book.

Some of the CD-ROM sets also include a street atlas, toll-free number directory, Web site directory, ZIP Code finder and more. The more CD-ROMs in the product’s box, the higher the price.

Which CD-ROMs you need depend on how you’re going to use them. For our office, we just need the white and yellow page directories. But if you are marketing to a target group, there are industry-specific products from American Business Information. Its physicians and surgeons offering contains 575,000 doctors’ names, addresses, phone numbers, date of medical school graduation and even his or her patient volume. It will cost you almost $600.

The CD-ROMs are only as good as the data contained in them. To test accuracy, I used 20 business and individual names and found each program yielded about the same 85% accuracy rate, with the exception of the American Business Information product. The ABI spat out messages announcing “name not found” about 80% of the time.

I found the ABI product ([800] 555-5666), which contains 104 million business and household listings, not only the most inaccurate but also the most cumbersome to use. You can search by individual or business name but not by address. The price is cheap, but you get what you pay for.

In September 1996, ABI purchased Digital Directory Assistance’s PhoneDisc PowerFinder ([800] 284-8353; $99.95; https:// www.dda-inc.com), which puts 114 million business and residential listings at your fingertips. Finding a company or business is as easy as typing in the name, street address, city, state, ZIP Code, business heading or phone number. This makes it handy to find a person or even every business in a particular office building.

I liked the product, but not as much as ProCD’s Select Phone ([800] 992-3766; $79; https://www.procd.com), which claims a 90% accuracy rate on 100 million white and yellow page listings. While there may be several million fewer listings in Select Phone than in PhoneDisc PowerFinder, the higher accuracy rate and additional capabilities and features, including maps, makes Select Phone a better buy.

With Select Phone, you can search just about any criteria easier and quicker than when using PhoneDisc PowerFinder. Select Phone also lets you limit your search to residential or business listings or both. In addition, unlike PhoneDisc PowerFinder, you can save your search results with Select Phone.

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Kim Komando is a Fox TV host, syndicated talk radio host and founder of the Komputer Klinic on America Online (keyword KOMANDO). She can be reached via e-mail at komando@komando.com