Phone directories used to be the telephone or short said phone book which in majority of the places was the big yellow book because the main provider with this book was the company which is known as Yellow Pages and they used to make a phone book for a city or country which for each area was completed with local contact information for the majority of persons, businesses of all kind and institutions meaning all categories as hospitals and other sorts of medical centers and services, banks and financial or non financial institutions, shops and malls, supermarkets and retailers, lawyers and many other types of business

Then the next step in the progression of phone directories were the call centers and every resident of a city, region or even country knew that there was a phone line where you could call by dialing a phone number or an information number and there you would be attending by an operator who will do the searching for you

The huge advantage is the fact that the call centers have many more databases from different sources but all contain accurate, verified information and the most important thing is the fact that they are in touch with everything that moves and in this way they can be sure to update the information daily and they can avoid offering the clients false information that will costs them time, money and reclamation from the clients of course and they will have to give them the money back and offer the right information for free because they have the 100 % guarantee policy .

Call centers soon became something really common and people were no longer surprised by the existence of many call centers for information so they could choose the company depending on the tariffs, how the tariffs are per call or per minute and which offered the most accurate information and more often

Then technology and the mighty internet managed to find something new in the area where you could have thought that there is nothing new to appear but there still were : the on-line phone directories did not exist but with more and more users of the internet and how internet became an important information media in our life and how more and more people used it to find out the things they were interested in, companies and many little producers found out that there was a lack that could be filled with the creation of this kind of directories

The on-line phone directories are much more comfortable for the users because you just have to open your pc and to surf on the internet pages and to look for a particular type of telephone number which depends on the provider company or you just search for universal phone directories which can contain many and various phone numbers which can belong to different providers so you can find many information in short period of time and in a very useful manner .

During the last years, the notion of phone directory has changed pretty much because there have appeared new products for this type of information and there have also been brought many other new things regarding this area of directory . Phone directories had to change because the main type of information that they were offering before disappeared and more and more other types have appeared

Fixed phone lines have become less used by people because as the time passes and with the apparition of cell phones many people began to want to have such a useful phone that could make many things more easily , they were able to get in contact with other people in real time no matter where they were . With the extension of the cell phone, there was the need for creating a cell phone directory but at the beginning it was difficult to be able to create such a directory because there were many restrictions regarding the privacy of the person who has a contract for a cell phone service and the restraints were very serious about this fact

But with the time, there have been created more and more non official cell phone directories and soon they became very popular and they could be found all ever the internet on many websites as you could find the older phone directories which had a longer existence because they contained numbers for the fixed phone lines .

The websites soon found another lack on the market because more and more clients wanted to be able to track down a number that had called you before and you did not answer and you do not to call and to get in contact with strangers or with someone you do not want to speak with or the numbers has been calling you and it keeps doing so late in the night and perhaps nobody talks but they do not quit to bother you all the time and you want to find out who that person is .

So in this way have appeared also the reverse phone directories which were something similar to the phone directories because they were also phone directories and the website functioned like a searching engines but the information was a little bit more different . Instead of having the searching fields where you completed the contact date about the number you wanted to find out like last name, first name, address, city, zip code or country or state and the search would end with the phone number in this case you have to fill in the number and the system will find the person under whose name it is the phone number listed .

Soon after the apparition of reverse phone directory and the cell phone directories, there has been also created the reverse phone directory for cell phones because if there was a cell phone directory it was normal for clients to find out the owners of the cell phone numbers which they do not know .

When we talk about phone directories , you always think at those big yellow printed books where you could find all the numbers . The main book is known as the “ Yellow Book “ which contains classified directories for business to consumer . They also offer another similar book which is known as “ White Pages “ that contains for each country where is commercialized an alphabetical list of residential and business numbers

This kind of service exists all over the world and every country has this national printed book and other kind of phone directories which are offered by local companies . It is a service at hand for everyone .

During the last few years, the definition of phone directories has change a little because there have also appeared other types of phone directories . In first place there appeared the call center, meaning there is a phone number or better said a phone line which usually has a phone number which is a short number formed from 4 digits and more recently there are the information numbers which all start with 118 and then is followed by another three digits which vary depending on the company who provides this kind of service .

When you call at this type of call center for information that you need, an operator will take your call and you will tell him what information do you need and the operator will begin to look it up through their databases with contact information for persons and all type of businesses

This kind of service can also be named as phone directory assistance because there is an operator who assists you and who takes care of your request and makes the search for you because in the end it has to come up to you with the requested information

This kind of service has to prove to offer accurate information and which is 100% verified because all companies who provide this type of service has tariffs per call and per minute and the majority of them charge you even for calling and then there is another tariff which is per minute, and as the minutes pass by, you will have to deal with a bigger cost of the call and information that you need will cost you extremely much . The phone directory assistance is a service that has to operate with good and accurate databases and the numbers which are given to the clients have to be first verified because only in this way the company can be sure that the clients are given accurate information which is not wrong or mistaken and their money have worth the service .

For avoiding problems with the clients, many of call centers may have a guarantee policy which covers 100 per cent the costs of the call for the needed information in case if the client it is given a number which is not functioning ,which is out of area or at which answers not the expected person or business .

When you have to find contact information for a person that you need to get in touch with him or she it is simple because there a lot of phone directories under different forms for different provider of telephone services and especially fixed phone lines and there have been create phone directories even by the companies which actually provide this type of services but also and by companies which specialized themselves only for directories .

If you talk about cell phone, even if there are many restrictions regarding the privacy of the people who own a cell phone number, there have appeared many non official cell phone directories for the majority of the companies which have large networks and a big number of clients .

The problem is when you have to deal with unlisted phone numbers but lately there has been a solution to this kind of problem . There have been created some web sites on the internet which are free reverse phone number directories but which also contain unlisted phone numbers so it can be call a sort of unlisted phone directory . On these websites you can find almost 80% of the total number of unlisted numbers and there has been a increasing also of cell numbers, there have appeared circa 35% such unlisted cell phone numbers .

Even if it is a wide range of such websites, all of them or at least a great part of them rely on accurate databases . This kind of service is extremely used by debt collectors, private investigators or detectives, even different non financial institutions, banks, different funds or even telemarketers because they need to find contact information about their clients who did not made their contact information public and available for any other phone directory

. Other important thing is the fact that many of these websites are actually free of charge but the quality of the information offered is high because there is real time information because the databases change really quick but it is been updated depending on the daily, weekly, monthly, annually changes and they can change the existent information, add some new information or even delete some of the information which is no longer accurate and a great part of the information are being verified by the workers of the system . Some companies sell such unlisted phone directory for such businesses as financial institutions and many funds, many banks or investment corporations .

It has been a total success the existence of websites which offer this kind of services with unlisted phone numbers because the majority of phone directories such as printed phone books or phone lines can offer only public information for their clients and it costs also a lot of money . In this way websites which contain this type of software and advanced applications can prove to be useful instruments and it can be used even by police for discovering the attempts of fraud such as the type of people who make credits with false information .

In the United States of America is impossible to talk about an only US phone directory because the number of phone directories which exist also for the fixed phone lines but also for the cell phone numbers and many great providers of telecommunications have created their own phone directories

One of the major phone directories is the one offered by AT&T- the largest providers of telecommunications services in United States of America ; their services include a wide range of telecommunication’s services, they offer : telephone services , wireless services, cell phone services, internet and many other digital services such as television . On the internet you can find their website with the phone numbers which are listed for this company .

There are also many other websited available on the internet which are something like yellow or white pages . One of the most used web sites which offers accurate information is Telcom Yellow Pages Directories . Other good example of free website which has a phone directory is dex phone directory or better said dexknows . localsearch ; it is extremely used because the website is free and offers a great variety of phone numbers

The searching procedure is extremely simply . The first step is to pick what you want to find : a business or a person . If you pick the one which is about business , you have to say what kind of business and where . You also have a list with the areas and cities for which the phone directories provides numbers . There is also the Bellsouth company which has created an extremely useful directory for their clients which is found in many various forms such as a printed phone book, a call center and also the web directory phone - bellsouth online phone directory

After the creation of these phone directories there also appeared the cell phone directories so many companies own a phone directory but also a cell phone directory ; so there is the case of the bellsouth cell phone directory . It works in a simple manner just like the other kind of phone directory . There you have searching fields where you have to type the first name, last name, country, city, area or zip code . Other example of cell phone directory is the sprint cell phone directory which has been working ever since 2005

There were many problems at the beginning because the collection of the cell phone number is made unofficial because there are many restrictions regarding the privacy of the people who have cell phone contracts . The searching criteria are also owner ‘s name , address and many other background information if it exists . The service is not free and because it does not always have accurate information you can ask for a refund because all services have 100% guarantee policy .

The US phone directory is composed of all the phone directories that are created by phone services providers or the companies who manage and in charge only with this type of products, but in the end it is important that there is a wide range of phone directories .