While I am usually ready to yap away on any topic, I tend to shy away from the “Are the Yellow Pages Relevant / Irrelevant?” Greg’s latest post on the topic brought out some heat in the comments.

Then I came across the wonderful argument for the Yellow Pages:

o your surprise you have a flooded basement. Are you going to stop and take the time to turn on your computer, wait for it to load, wait for the internet connection to actually work with you, connect and then search? No most people are going to pick up their Verizon Yellow pages flip to the type of business they need and call. That is what it is all about.

Of course there is another one down the page, and I’ve seen this argument a few other times.

Other than the inherent fear-mongering (oh noes it takes 20 minutes to load up your web browser, at which point your house will have fallen down), the entire argument is rather extreme and simplistic. What she has outlined is a worst case situation. I don’t ever remember my house being flooded. The other comment below argues what happens if the electricity goes out. The last time I remember the electricity going out was the massive East Coast Grid failure back in 2003 (at which point calling an electrician would have been useless).

As someone who has moderated a ton of reviews by business owners, the comments themselves reek of someone from inside the YP area making that comment. What boggles my mind is … is that the best there is? That one should keep the YP around for extremely rare cases? I should have some giant book take up space because maybe, just maybe, I might lose the electricity? Or because it is so complicated to turn on your computer and ‘connect’ to the internets? That is the argument? Are you kidding me? And I haven’t even mentioned the iPhone yet - in both cases I have local search bookmarked, it would take me roughly 15 seconds to navigate to a page to do a search, flood or no flood, electricity or no electricity.

Everything has strengths and weaknesses. All this bluster does no one any good.