Where does 411.com get it's updates? [telecom]

411.com, address.com, and phonenumber.com are all whitepages.com. That whitepages.com compiles some business listings is new within the last year. They have a note that some business listings are from localeze.com and that if that's the source, it's noted in the detailed listing, but they don't tell you the source of other listings.

whitepages.com used to be pretty good when the lists they consolidated all came from telephone directories but that hasn't been their business model in a few years.

I wouldn't use the word "update" with these online databases. If they buy a list, they add the information, and they have no interest in checking if the information is out of date or never was correct. There's a difference between list consolidation and a useful product.

Now, Intellius and Dun + Bradstreet, major brokers of business lists, make an attempt to call each business telephone number in their database once a year (so they claim), although I doubt they reach them all that often. If they do encounter bad information, they remove it.

***** Moderator's Note *****

Thanks for the info. Is there an update process? In other words, how can my eye doctor get her listing corrected?

Bill Horne Moderator

Admittedly I haven't checked myself in an online "white pages" in a couple of years, but phone numbers I had when George W. Bush was still governor of Texas, plus numbers I never had, still appeared.

Do people still use services like 411.com? Apparently at least one Massachusetts resident does. These days I rely on Google. I think your eye doctor would be better off creating a Google Places page than trying to play whack-a-mole with all the online directories out there.

John

New Verizon phone books were distributed in our area, and they no longer contain white pages listing. The directory said to use wwww.verizon.com/whitepages .

This link brought up a very different kind of directory search that seemed to be much more accurate than other types. It seems to be based on directory listings, and you can even see the directory page. I checked for my own current and past listings (that other search engines always got wrong) and they were correct on this page. It also did _not_ have any links to advertised services. Other search engines have ads for what seems to be sleazy "find this person" services.

Oops, I made an error. I didn't mean Intellius, which is a list consolidator of information about individuals, but InfoUSA as a major source of business listings.

whitepages.com may or may not identify the source of the listing. If the source is identified, then she will have to track it down there. If not, this page has a link to a form to fill out:

The trouble is that there are no true sources of listings that don't come from listings of telephone subscribers from the phone companies themselves. These sites all sell to each other, and you cannot stop one site that's consolidated bad information from selling it to another site that treats it as an original source, but then won't tell anyone using their database where it came from.

I'd check InfoUSA

and dnb.com/ She'll need to find her DUNS number to use the latter. These two are the source for other databases but may not be the source of the whitepages.com errors.

I'd also check yellowpages.com which will tell you where the bad information came from, if it's necessary to call them.

It's a time consuming and ultimately futile process.

Whoa. I hadn't looked at the Dun & Bradstreet Web site in a while.

For those who don't know, D&B is a credit reporting and rating service for businesses. I don't actually know if banks use it to make decisions on business loans. They sell the rating service to businesses trying to establish credit worthiness and to businesses that wish to extend credit to other businesses. D-U-N-S is a number they assign to a business profile, which may or may not be linked to a credit rating.

As D&B is also a list consolidator, they have an automatic process that assigns a new D-U-N-S to what it thinks is another location for the same business. However, a business can get out of date and inaccurate profiles removed. If they can, a D-U-N-S is linked to a corporate file number assigned by the state that issued the corporate charter. A business with one location should have just the one D-U-N-S.

A business can update its profile:

as of January 8, 2011, the representative of the business updating the profile must provide his own personally identifying information including home address and home telephone number which must be used for pattern matching against credit headers from a personal credit database.

The old eUpdate process to correct or update a D-U-N-S profile didn't used to be that intrusive.

This crosses a line with personal privacy, so unless one's business headquarters and home address are one and the same, I wouldn't volunteer this information. Leave the inaccuracies in place, then.