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Author Archives: Alex

Add Your Cell Number

We just did a beta launch of a new feature on our site that allows you to add your cell number to our site. We are doing this strictly on an opt-in basis, because that is what our users have told us to do. Why add your cell phone? If you’re like me, to be easily reachable by others that you care about. In fact, although both my home and cell phones are listed on WhitePages.com, I prefer that people call me on my cell. After all, I carry it with me everywhere and I turn it off when I don’t want to be disturbed (unlike my home landline phone). It’s also good to know that I can be easily contacted in the event of an emergency. For others, such as service professionals for example, there might be business reasons to add their cell phone.

For this first beta release, we’re keeping the service very rudimentary. Although the service seems very simple on the surface, this is a very big milestone for us at WhitePages.com because it marks the first time ever that…
- we have added cell numbers to our site
- we have allowed our users to contribute listings
- we have configured our database to allow real-time updates on a listing-by-listing basis

Lots of product development and engineering heroics have gone into making that possible. Woo hoo!

Now that we have our foundation built, please stay tuned over the coming months, as we look forward to layering lots of additional (and useful!) services on top of the base offering.

Posted by Alex on April 30, 2008 – 5:05 pm in New Products, News, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment

Searching for People Search

We were delighted to see how high “white pages” and “people search” rank among the top 25 non-branded/non-adult search terms , recently compiled by Compete, especially given that we bought PeopleSearch.com just a few months ago. And we even beat “britney spears” at #18! We typically ranks lower among all keywords if you include branded terms (e.g. myspace, yahoo, etc.) but I haven’t seen any third party cut the list like this before. Based on other data we have access to, e.g. Google Trends, we actually know of some inaccuracies in Compete’s top list, but the bigger point is that our services are clearly in high demand as measured by web search queries. As we continue to improve on our services and as more people find us, hopefully they can focus more on just people search, rather than searching for people search!

Top Search Terms - Jan 2008
1. dictionary
2. heath ledger
3. white pages
4. weather
5. lyrics
6. yellow pages
7. people search
8. irs
9. fafsa
10. cloverfield

Full top 25 list at Compete.

Posted by Alex on February 25, 2008 – 12:58 pm in Marketing, News | 0 Comments

Now with 80% People Coverage!

Yes, that’s right. With 180 million people in our database, we now cover 80% of all US adults. Given that we started 2007 at just 40% coverage, which is where the rest of the directory assistance industry is at, the team here feels real good about ending the year with this milestone. After all, we have doubled the size of our database in just under a year.

What’s the significance of this? On most other directory assistance-like websites (as well as calling 411 directory assistance), you have approximately a 4-out-of-10 chance to find the person you’re searching for, whereas on our websites, you now have an 8-out-of-10 chance. That’s quite a different user experience. Looking at this milestone more broadly, this marks the first time ever that you can find 80% of the US adult population in a free, easily accessible service. Yet another perspective… compare us to some of the other leading online repositories of people data:

people search database size

To be fair, this chart is not an apples-to-apples comparison, nor do we want want it to be an apples-to-apples comparison. After all, we are quite happy to differentiate in the sense that:

We provide instant gratification to our users who seek contact info (rather than first having to become “friends”).
We are free (unlike pay-per-lookup or subscription-based sites).
We have better coverage (as is evident from the chart above after all). Why? We aggregate data from multiple sources, including offline.
We serve a simple use case: finding and connecting people with each other. No fuss.

What do you think of the various improvements we have launched recently?

Posted by Alex on December 11, 2007 – 9:50 am in News | 0 Comments

Improved Search Forms

And here is another website enhancement launching in time for the Holidays… We just added new persistent search forms at the top of all our search results (as well as the “not found” pages). This will make it easier for you modify your searches on our site, which will benefit all users (in particular those of you who are power users). We have also improved the user interface for our search suggestions, which you’ll notice throughout the website as you conduct searches.

How do you like these improvements? What can we do better for you?

persistent search forms

Posted by Alex on November 16, 2007 – 4:55 pm in New Products, News | 1 Comment

Makeover for WhitePages.com

We have several exciting launches in store during the coming month just in time for the Holidays. Yesterday evening, we kicked things off with a complete makeover of WhitePages.com. As you can see, the website is a whole lot leaner and cleaner in appearance. But the site also works a heck of a lot better. For example, work listing and age info stands out visually much better now than before (screenshot below). And it’s easier to tell apart home listings from work listings with the new color coded icons.

multi results listing

Our “Listing Details” page now features well-integrated maps that appear right on that page without unnecessary additional clicks to view the maps.

listing detail page

How do you like these improvements? What can we do better for you?

Posted by Alex on November 9, 2007 – 5:45 pm in New Products, News | 0 Comments

More people and more info!

A big portion of our team has worked over the past few weeks/months on website improvements that went live earlier today. We now have 128 million U.S. people in our database, which represents 57 percent of the US adult population. This is the only place on the web where you can look up 128 million people conveniently and for free (most of our direct competitors are right around 90 million people).

crowd

We also added age information on most of the people in our database, which is particularly helpful to quickly narrow a search down to the right individual when you retrieve multiple search results. Try a search for “John Smith” in any city, and you’ll see what I mean. To protect people’s privacy, we have gone a step above and beyond standard practice, and substituted specific birth years for 5-year ranges.

And in addition to all that, we also added a whole slew of other feature improvements today that we are very excited about. I will spare you of those details on this blog. You will just simply notice a better general search experience when you visit our sites. Take our word for it!

Posted by Alex on August 23, 2007 – 8:53 pm in News | 0 Comments

2007 Best Companies to Work For

We attended the prestigious “100 Best Companies to Work For” awards yesterday evening, hosted by Washington CEO Magazine. We did not win, but we were delighted to be there as a Top 100 finalist. Let me provide some background…

Last year, we applied and failed to make the final cut into a highly competitive field of top 100 employers. So during this past March, after a particularly challenging time for the company, we were understandably not overly optimistic about our chances. In fact, our greater concern was not about achieving finalist status, but rather whether our staff might think that the leadership was in la-la-land applying for an award like this, which required our staff to fill out detailed satisfaction surveys. In the end, we still decided to apply, not necessarily to qualify as a top 100 finalist, but because we figured that at very least we would obtain some free and valuable employee survey data to help us manage the company as well as possible for the rest of the year. At all times, we were pretty much resigned to receiving some very tough survey feedback and had no designs on winning.

So it was a huge surprise when we learned that this year, during what was one of our darkest periods after the layoff, we made the cut as a finalist company. Woo hoo! Who would ever have expected that? What a resilient culture we have at WhitePages.com. Thanks to everyone on the team for making this such a great place! We may do better in the future, but I will always remember our strong showing this year given the unique circumstances.

WA CEO Magazine - Best Companies to Work For

Posted by Alex on June 29, 2007 – 8:34 am in Life@, News | 0 Comments

At-Work Contact Info!

We have done a soft launch of at-work contact info. That’s right, you can now look up the at-work contact info (address/phone/email) for approx. 8 million people. Over the coming weeks, we’ll add this info for up to another 13 million people, so our total at-work database might be up to 21 million people. (That’s a lot of people by the way… as many as all of Australia!)

Why am I excited about this? Here are some other reasons:
I can now reach people at work. Especially for my professional contacts, I dread calling them at home, but sometimes I only have their home number. Our research indicates that twice as many people prefer to call their professional contacts at work rather than at home (37% vs. 19%).

Regardless of where I prefer to call a person, sometimes I just simply must reach a certain individual right away. I can soon reach another 20 million Americans 9am-5pm, Mon-Fri, via WhitePages.com.

This represents a big quantum leap ahead of the competition for WhitePages.com. With the other projects in the pipeline, we hope to provide many more firsts for our site users in 2007.

Stay tuned for more!

Posted by Alex on May 22, 2007 – 11:19 am in News | 0 Comments

Happy 10th Birthday to Us!

Today we celebrated our 10th birthday (one of several celebrations we have planned). It’s pretty amazing how quickly time has gone by. It doesn’t feel like we are an “old” company by any means, although by Internet standards, 10 years is an eternity. Rather, it feels to me like we have retained the energy, fun, dynamism, and rapid growth of a small agile company — I hope that we can preserve that as we continue to grow. Hence, we have decided that we are celebrating being “10 years young”. After all, we have so much more to do as WhitePages.com enters adolescence! With that said, for taking us this far during our first 10 years of life, thank you to our great staff and users!

(Please sign our virtual bday card and post a comment below!)

captain contacts
Max high-fives our super hero, Captain Contact, as the latter bursts out of our bday cake.
staff
Our awesome Team WhitePages.com.
cupcake
The celebration continues at my desk