Electronic Yellow Pages are online versions of traditional printed business directories produced by telephone companies around the world. Typical functionalities of online yellow pages include the alphabetical listings of businesses and search functionality of the business database by name, business or location. Since Electronic Yellow Pages are not limited by space considerations, they often contain far more comprehensive business information such as vicinity maps, company profiles, product information, and more.
An advantage of Electronic Yellow Pages is that they can be updated in real time; therefore, listed businesses are not constrained by once-a-year publishing of the printed version which leads to greater accuracy of the listings since contact information may change at any time.
Before the popularity of the internet, business telephone numbers in the United Kingdom could be searched by accessing a remote computer terminal by modem. The initial prototype of this was superseded in 1990 with a commercial service. This service allowed searches via Name, Business classification and locality for business listings and a free text field was provided to allow "unstructured text" searching of Adverts. This dialup service was available via Prestel and "BT Gold" services. The service Electronic Yellow Pages was superseded in the mid-1990s by the internet service www.yell.com. A similar system called Phonebase for published residential phone numbers was discontinued in the 1990s, being superseded by a web-based search interface.