Where do you find a good plumber?

MagicYellow online Yellow Pages

Has anyone actually used MagicYellow.com? Basically, it's the phone book online. It's a bunch of companies that said, "hey, Mr. Yellow, let me be in your book. Here's $5." Basically, the point is that there is no quality control to these kinds of sites. There's also ServiceMagic.com, FindaContractor.com, and a handful of other websites that generate leads for the average contractor.

To the contractor, it's a risk, but not a high one. ServiceMagic sells leads in groups of 10, 20, or more per month, and the contractor simply pays a fixed fee.

For the consumer, the service is marketed as a way to find "pre-screened" contractors to work in your home, but in actuality, there's nothing "magic" about the service providers. They are just the ones that were good enough to pay ServiceMagic for the placement on the website.

So, again, where do you find a good plumber? The answer is, we don't know. At least, as far as the internet is concerned, we don't know. Nobody is taking full advantage of the abilities of vertical search or Web 3.0 in this realm on a large scale.

Essentially, MagicYellow is still in the age of Web 1.0, serving up big lists. There's not much of an algorithm to go with. We've got the resources to do much better than that.