I’ve not gotten a phone book with white pages in it for years. So looking for phone numbers, I have to turn to the internet. But all I find there are pay sites. All I want is a fucking phone number. How the hell can you find phone numbers anymore without breaking out the credit card every time?
Try anywho.com. I was able to look up my own number without paying using the full name and city. They have to be listed numbers of course. My cell # did not show up just the landline.
Here in Canada there’s a simple free website that will look up any personal or business name in the country, provided by the national consortium of telecom carriers. There appears to be a similar service in the US, but I don’t know anything more about it.
Thank you!
I use Google. Just about any business I ever look up, Google will show me the location on the map, address, phone number, and hours.
Do people still write them on restroom walls (“FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL…”)?
If it’s a local place of business, I usually just find it on Google Maps and click on it. They’ll usually have the phone number & website.
I read that the UK recently stopped printing its Yellow Pages.
Whose phone number are you looking for? If you want to find a business number, Google or 411.com will find it for you. But if you want an individual’s phone number… that’s considered private now, and it’s probably an unlisted cell phone number anyway.
People switch phone numbers more often than before, so records for individual phone numbers are poor. I’ve had my landline number for over a decade, and it’s listed… under the previous owner’s name. We get debt collectors and family members who don’t speak English calling every once in a while.
Another thing I’ve noticed… few people have identifiable voicemail messages anymore, if the number is not directly-relevant to business. If they give a name, it’s usually just the first name.
Here in the UK British Telecommunications have an online phone book.
That’s if you know the business you’re looking for. Oh how I wish for the old fashioned yellow pages when looking up a(n unknown) business online.
For example, if I’m looking for shoe repair near ____ I am not interested in results for new shoes, or new boots, or shoe repair places in TX. :mad:
To look for a type of business in a specific radius, use Yelp. Or refine your Google search with your zip code, like “shoe repair 97420.”
The OP mentioned the white pages, so I suspect he’s looking for phone numbers of private individuals, not businesses.
In the good old days, there was just The Phone Company, who provided phone service to everyone who had a phone. Thus, they had a master list of everyone’s number and could publish it as The Phone Book.
Nowadays, there are multiple different telephone service providers, so no one entity keeps track of everyone’s number. Except, there’s gotta be some central agency or mechanism or database that at least is in charge of making sure the same number doesn’t get reassigned to more than one person, right? How is that handled?
Note that in the old days, a fair number of people used to pay extra for an unlisted number, which has now become what you get anyway if you’ve ditched your landline. Some people LIKE it that way, including some who didn’t want to pay extra for the unlisted number. If I didn’t personally tell you my phone number, or you didn’t get it from a mutual friend or relative, I don’t want you to call me.
In North America, that’s NANPA, the North American Numbering Plan Administration. They aren’t going to publish a list, and I don’t believe they could if they wanted to - the way they operate is to give pools of numbers to the various carriers to assign as they wish as long as it’s in accordance with the numbering plan. AFAIK, there is no provision for the individual carrier to report who they’ve assigned their numbers to. With portable numbers now, there is a provision for a number to move from one carrier to another, and the whole concept of an “area code” is eroding, although NANPA still tries to maintain them.
Thanks, yabob.
For business numbers I just search Facebook.
For an individual’s number I text mutual friends to see if they know the number. If someone were trying to find my number I’m pretty certain they’d never find it. I only have a cellphone, and the people who have my number know I do not want them to share it.
How do you figure that?
If anything, people switch numbers much less than they used to. In the days before cell phones became common, any time that you moved to a new state, or even a new city within a state, you got a new number whether you wanted to or not.
But now people can move clear across the country, and keep the same number. You can hardly even guess anymore where somebody lives based on the area code.
I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t know. In the six years I’ve lived in Taiwan, I’ve only had less than a handful of unknown callers I actually wanted to talk to.
If someone wants to get in contact with me, they can ask a friend to send me a message and I’ll contact them.
I have an uncommon last name. It’s not really rare, but there were only six people with that last name in the Salt Lake City / Ogden White Pages in 1990, the year I moved to Japan. That included my mother, brother and I. I forgot the population, but probably around 700,000 people.
Just before I moved, I went on a vacation for a couple of weeks and came back to an answering machine full of messages for merchants, attorneys and collection agencies looking for someone with the same first and last name. He had bounced a bunch of checks and they were trying to track him down.
I called a couple of them back but they didn’t believe me when I said they had the wrong person.
That was the last time I had a listing.
A remarkable number of people get a new number when they get a new cell phone. And these are often people who get new phones regularly either due to upgrades, losing, or breaking the old phone.
Since porting the old number is fairly simple I don’t understand this behavior. It seems to be quite selfish. This doesn’t impede the person calling out but is a hassle for people trying to call in since they need to somehow get the new number and update the contact info.
Maybe if they lost their old SIM or are switching carriers the extra delay of recovering the old number is too much hassle, especially if the phone was destroyed/stolen and they need to get back up and running ASAP?
You don’t need to look up that one. We all know it’s 867-5309. Ask for Jenny.