The Google Phone Book

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One of the great underrecognized features of Google is the built-in phone and address book. This is not a link-over deal like maps (see the preceding section) or stock prices. The Google index embodies address and phone-number information, like the White Pages. In my experience, Google does a better job culling this information from its index than do the high-profile online directories (Yahoo!, Switchboard, WhoWhere, and others).

Activating the Google phone and address book is a somewhat hit-and-miss affair, but Google takes the hint as easily here as it does with the mapping function. Type a first name, a last name, and a ZIP Code in the keyword box, and if that person's address is in the index, Google displays it above the regular search results (along with the phone number). Don't know the zip code? Who does? Replace it with the U.S. state abbreviation - that works fine. No commas are necessary in the keyword string.

Tip 

Google provides a specialized search operator (a keyword modifier) that hooks into the phone book. Unsurprisingly, it's the phonebook operator. Use it without any spaces between the colon and the first keyword (see Chapter 2 for more on using Google's operators), like this:
phonebook:smith ny

Figure 16-4 shows the results of this search. As you can see, the volume of results sometimes requires multiple pages, just as with a Web search. Another difference in this results page is just below the keyword box. After Google dips into its phone book, it presumes that you might want to stay there for a while, and gives you a choice of applying your next keywords to the phone book or to a Web search.

Figure 16-4: The Google phone book in action.

By the way, you can narrow your phone book searches to residential only or business only by using variants of the plain phonebook operator:

• Use rphonebook for residential listings

• Use bphonebook for business listings

Using the bphonebook operator, Google turns into one heck of a fast Yellow Pages directory. Looking for a Chinese restaurant in your neighborhood? Lay down the keyword string with your ZIP Code:

bphonebook:chinese restaurant 10010

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