There is a complex process for keeping this database up to date. It takes time. The least that can be done is to let us browse a directory rather than plow through a clunky database. Amatzia Ben-Artzi, one of the inventors of Internet Protocol and now chief executive of NetPost in Mountain View, Calif., has a solution. Display ads appear just like in the book and, since this is the Internet, phone companies can sell merchants the right to link their businesses to these pages.
Phone companies can even host sites for little companies.
Ben-Artzi is in talks with all the phone companies to implement the system. Whether they will let him is another issue. An old-fashioned database engine that is inconvenient, awkward and simply nerdy is not the future of information retrieval. Reprinted with permission.