If you&#x27;ve tried to look up a residential phone number on the web in the last few years, you&#x27;ve surely noticed that it has been useless. You get no information or spammy&#x2F;scamly results even though a physical telephone book--assuming you still receive such a thing--still does have correct information for landlines.<p>The results of a reverse phone lookup are worse than useless because of a recent trend of bizarre sites that list <i>completely false</i> names and addresses for every 10-digit US&#x2F;Canadian phone number. They don&#x27;t even have ads, so I don&#x27;t understand what they&#x27;re getting out of listing fake information, and why Google doesn&#x27;t push down their rank.<p>So my question is Why happened to online phone info? Are landline phone companies no longer making directory information available? I&#x27;ve heard that cellular companies do not publish any directory information (is that right?), but there are still millions of residential landlines. What happened to that data?
Ask HN: Why has online directory assistance (phone lookup) become useless?