Ever have a situation where you need to find someone or something quickly on the web? 

A couple of weeks ago, I was working in my office when I noticed some water coming through the carpet at the base of the stairs (my office is in the basement).  I quickly checked around and saw that the water heater was leaking - water on the floor of the closet where it's kept and leaking out of the T&P valve!  I put some towels down to dry up what was on the floor and a bucket to catch anything additional.  Then what to do - call the plumber, naturally!

Of course, since we moved into our house 3 1/2 years ago, we haven't needed a plumber, so don't have anyone we work with or that I knew to call.  I hit the web and searched for 'plumbers' and my town name into Google and got back nearly 26,000 results.  Fortunately, there were some relevant ones on top, and several of them were Directory services.

I picked one of the services at random, filled out a form requesting service and put in a phone call - which went, not to the plumber I selected, but to a service bureau.  It turns out that with this directory, they take the calls, get information about what you are looking for and then contact several of their pre-screened vendors who call you back.  It's an interesting model, but not what I was looking for at that particular moment.  I did find a plumber pretty quickly who could be over that afternoon and we ended up replacing the water heater the next day.

In retrospect, though,  I've been thinking more about Directory services - both along functional and geographic lines:  Google is fantastic - I use it whenever I need to find a piece of information - at least as a starting point.  But given the situation I was in, there's too much information available.  Yes, I probably could have phrased a query that would have given me a smaller subset of results, but I wasn't in the mood to play around with different search combinations - I wanted a plumber who was close to my home and (ideally) could be at my house in a short period of time.  Hitting a specialized directory gave me just what I needed when I needed it.

Specialized Directories will likely play in increasingly large role in our online future.  As the total amount of information available to search increases, they provide a way of pre-filtering results which allows for faster decision-making.  They will also become community sites, particularly when implemented using portal or social networking tools, allowing communication and feedback to flow back and forth between members of the directory and users.

What do you think?