No, we’re not abandoning our core business of providing the most comprehensive free online people search (including of course, traditional white pages listings). But we are moving away from a vestige of the old telco model – viewing people as landline households rather than, well, people.
We’ve released two somewhat subtle but important changes to the web site this week that lay the foundation for a person-centered search model.
First and foremost, we have restructured our results so that you now see the person for whom you are searching rather than multiple people in the same household who are often listed together in a traditional phone book. So searching for “Keela Robison” now results in my individual listing rather than “Keela and David Robison”. I love my husband dearly, but we are in fact two separate people and now the WhitePages service reflects that. At the same time, we’ve retained the information about the other adults in the household to aid in identifying the correct result. My name is quite unique, however names of other household members would be helpful in determining which John Smith you are looking for.
The second is a graphical change in our home / work / cell phone icons that takes us a small step closer to enabling our customers to combine their listings so that they appear as a single individual with multiple contact types. More on that to come…
In addition to the above, this week’s release also included over a dozen smaller enhancements and bug fixes, making it a fairly substantive release. We hope that you enjoy the improvements. Please let us know how we’re doing: post your comment below.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I absolutely love your site! I am in the healthcare field maintaining records for a Top 100 Hospital and I have a shortcut on my desktop because I refer to your site so often.
Whatever you do, please do not make it more difficult for us to identify the correct household…any extra information you can give is most helpful. Quite often we need the spouse’s name to help locate an individual.
I like the household feature, but my listing lists several people who used to live at my address and no longer do. I do not like that part. Is there a way to fix it?
Hi Brooke,
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, we’ve heard of cases like yours where the household information is not up to date from our data providers. We’re actively working on capabilities to allow you to claim your listing and make any corrections or additions, including changing or deleting household members. It turns out that this is a relatively big endeavor from a technical perspective so it’s taking some time, however we’re optimistic that we’ll be able to provide this capability sometime later this year.
Thanks again for your feedback.