As a mom, I have to say: I’m disappointed. But as a product owner for the most popular people search site on the Internet, I’m at least glad that we’re helping people to connect with confidence.
Beyond our expected growth rate, we saw a relatively significant bump in both unique visitors (+7%) and people searches (+10%) in the week leading up to Mother’s Day. Apparently, people don’t know their mother’s addresses and phone numbers. Nice.
Also of interest, the Mother’s Day traffic increase was slightly greater this year than in the prior few years, suggesting that kids are reaching out more than ever to their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and the like. I’m really hoping that this is not to ask for money in tough times.
We do tens of millions of people searches every week on WhitePages.com, so a 10% lift is significant.
Instead, I’m confident that you kids are just double-checking addresses and phone numbers for the deliveries of flowers and other gifts that you bought for Mother’s Day. Indeed, our yellow page search volumes for the week also show an increase, and the florist category jumped to #2 last May (other than in February, florist is usually in our top 10-20 range of popular business search categories).
Perhaps this is just another sign that the Internet is taking over traditional information storage such as physical address books. Searching is so quick and easy (particularly on our new site!) that fewer and fewer people bother writing contact information on paper or even copying into digital address books that quickly get out of date.
That being said, please do me a favor and at least take the time to program your Mom’s phone number into your cell phone, or for those of you who use landlines, your automatic dialer. She deserves a call more than once a year.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Where do we find zip code to mail a letter?
When you search for a person, you will generally get a list of possible matches. Point your mouse over the person for whom you were looking, and click on their name (underlined) and then you’ll see the details page which includes the zip code, and phone number if available.
Why is it necessary to sign up for getting white pages .com ? I never had to do that before!! I was going to sign up and tried typing in the birth date . It would not go past three letters. Why is this necessary? I will not pay for this or put any personal information in such as credit card numbers or checking account info.
Hi Julie. You don’t need to pay anything or provide a credit card or checking account to use WhitePages.
We have the largest set of free listings in the U.S., including many listings that aren’t available in any other free service. These can be new addresses for people who have moved, work addresses that don’t typically appear in a directory, or member-added listings that have been added directly by WhitePages members. When you join WhitePages (for free!) you get access to all of our listings.
It only takes a few minutes to join WhitePages. You can do so here: http://www.whitepages.com/listing