goudengids.be
... or, 'yellow pages.be'. Or something.
I like it that there is an on-line version of the Belgian yellow pages. Who wants to look up a phone number in a huge book, anyway? And that's ignoring the fact that it isn't any good for the environment.
I also like it that the yellow pages are now no longer distributed by default on paper. You can still get them, if you so wish, but you have to explicitly request them.
Of course, searching an on-line database is also faster than flipping through pages until you find what you're looking for. What's more, you can limit your search to your location rather than whatever shops just happen to be in the version of the book that is distributed to your house. That makes it much more efficient, since rather than all thousands of computer shops in the whole province, you'll find the computer shops in your municipality. Or the ones that are in a radius around your address, if you choose that option.
Rather, that would be the case. But for some unfathomable1 reason, truvo, the company behind the yellow pages, decided to make the option that gets you the names and numbers of companies that serve your region, rather than companies that actually are in your region, as the default. And since there's really n o limit to what companies can enter as the 'region' they serve, you suddenly get a name for a shop hundreds of kilometers away when all you wanted was to find the closest grocery store.
D'oh.
1 Yes, yes, I can guess that money has something to do with it. But whatever, that don't matter.
I suppose the service provider gets paid by the shops that want to list their address, right? And the shops want to have their address want to have their address shown to more customers rather than less.
It would have even worked if the shops didn't provide unrealistic coverage areas, but many will inevitably present themselves as bigger than they really are, making the service less effective in the process.
Unfortunately even if they did realize it (the effect is quite indirect), it would still behaves like prisoner's dilemma—if just a few cheat, they get advantage (their address comes up unfairly more often), so none wants to be the first to stop.