| REVIEWS
Cruising
Cyberspace
Web
Site Pick Of The Month
By Pam Wegmann
One of the uses you
frequently hear touted regarding the Internet is the ability use it to
find people and businesses. There are multiple sites where you type in
a person’s name and find their address and phone number or e-mail address.
One of the more well known sites for doing so is
http://www.switchboard.com
Switchboard.com bills
itself as a business and people locator, a site where you can find an address,
phone number, map to a location and an e-mail address. In short, while
it succeeds sometimes, it’s an excellent example of the shortcomings of
the Net as a research tool.
This is a visually
busy site, sometimes too busy. The front page is the usual assortment of
ads vying for your attention. The advertising gets worse on the subsequent
pages with multiple banners across the top and sides. At first, it was
hard on one of the inside pages to visually locate the button just
to get back to the home page of the site.
Generally, the site
is divided into six major sections, three being its main function: find
a person, find a business, and find e-mail. Overall, we found the results
to be weak. We used my name and company name to see what could be found,
considering the fact that both names are easy to find via our local paper
telephone directory.
Under Find A Person,
I started with the more specific search and moved to more general requirements
when the more detailed search failed to get any results. It took four searches
to finally locate some information. Asking for: name: Pamela Wegmann;
city: New Orleans; state: LA got zero results. Next, we dropped
the city completely so that we asked for a Pamela Wegmann anywhere in Louisiana.
Results? Zero. We tried Pam Wegmann anywhere, Louisiana. Again, zip.
Finally, we tried
a very simplistic search: last name only and Louisiana. We
got 49 hits, and found two entries, both as P Wegmann, one with my fax
and one with my modem number, but not my regular telephone number. The
address was correct. What’s at work here is bad data, missing data, and
a very literal, unforgiving search logic algorithm.
Under Find A Business,
one can search by category or name. Again, it could not find my company’s
name, although our company is listed in both the yellow and white pages
of the local telephone directories. Plus, when I searched by yellow pages
category, a number of local companies who should have popped up, did not.
The Find E-Mail
search using a last name only also failed to turn up my
e-mail address (or
any local family members with the same last name who I know have e-mail
addresses) even though all we searched on was last name only.
You can also click
to Maps & Directions, where one can get a map drawn for you by address,
landmark, or category. This section seems to work well.
Lastly, there’s a
link to Message Boards, where users can post a message under any of the
two dozen topics listed, such as business, travel,
people, entertainment,
etc. The collection of postings predictably runs from the legitimate to
the questionable.
If you are trying
to locate someone, Switchboard.com is, as we have just demonstrated, far
from adequate. It may help you as long as you have realistic expectations.
Knowledge is Power!
:-)
September 1999
Questions/Comments
can be sent to pam@info-matters.com
or faxed to 504.738.0016. You can also reach Ms. Wegmann at 504.738.0070.
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