search within each of these 3 digit domains and/or the adjacent ones. The user should not
be expected to know which 3 digit domain corresponds to which area; it should be
enough to know their own phone number. If the user specifically wants to look for a
business in Clontarf, say, they can search by location.
Nonetheless, there are situations where the search area might need to be greater. If there
happens not to be enough of a selection of used car dealers in the 025 area, the search can
be expanded to encompass all of the surrounding area codes. This approach has a couple
of advantages over searching by town and then by county. Mitchelstown is on the north
eastern border of County Cork so a resident of that town is more likely to be interested in
businesses in Cahir, Co. Tipperary or Kilmallock, Co. Limerick or Lismore Co.
Waterford than Castletownbere in West Cork.
The first set of options presented to the user, then, will be either to search by town or
street name or to search by area code (officially referred to as a National Dialling Code).
3.3.2 Searching by location
Searching by location is straightforward. A user should be able to type in any part of a
postal address and get results back with addresses matching that. We are making an
assumption that users will realise that there are multiple O`Connell streets in Ireland and
that, while results for such a query would indeed be returned, they are likely to be
relatively uninformative. A more common location query would be the name of a town,
or a district or suburb of a city, such as Rathkeale (Limerick), Knocknaheeny (Cork) or
Ballyfermot (Dublin).
3.3.3 Searching by ad caption
When leafing through the print edition of the Golden Pages, one`s eye is often drawn to
the picture ads, for which advertisers pay premium rates, depending on the size of the
graphic. A particularly eye catching image will stay in the memory far longer than the
actual name of the business with which it was associated. A customer who decides to deal
with a business with a picture ad and finds the service satisfactory will, on returning to
the book later on, probably be inclined to head straight for the picture. The more visually
striking the picture, the likelier this is to happen.
The online service differs in a number of ways. Firstly, the graphics can now be made far
more complex at no extra cost. Anyone should be allowed to scan in a photograph of
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