I’m speaking of my experiences in the United States. Here, phone books tend to be separated into white pages and yellow pages. The white pages listed names, addresses and phone numbers of private lines, usually homes, and the yellow pages listed businesses. Taking out a listing in the yellow pages was the SEO of its day.

When the internet happened, the one thing that never really happened was a freely searchable database of the white pages. One thing the internet was never useful for as an upstanding citizen was looking up personal phone numbers.