Google Trends: Yellow Pages Will Be Toast In Four Years

Sep 24, 2007 at 12:04pm ET by Chris Silver Smith

Local marketing industry savants have long been predicting the demise of print Yellow Pages books, going the way of the buggy whip due to overwhelming competition from Internet alternatives. Further, the aggressive invasion of search engines into the local space during the past few years has inspired some analysts to wonder if Internet Yellow Pages directories might also be headed for extinction along with the printed books. Readily available stats from Google show trends and provide a good sense of what’s actually going on across the local space on the Internet. Ironically, we can also use these stats to predict the demise of traditional Yellow Pages sites.

I did a search via Google Trends to compare the magnitude of searches for “yellow pages” and “white pages,” and here’s the chart of these searches from 2004 to present:

Full article: http://searchengineland.com/google-trends-yellow-pages-will-be-toast-in-four-years-12256