Darby Sieben -

Canada’s original find a person website, Canada411.ca is now available on through iTunes for your iPhone and iPod. Just like your white pages, this application allow you to search for any person in Canada, coast to coast.

Features include:

- two search boxes, who and where (search by city keyword, neighborhood or GPS search)
- search businesses nearby a person’s location
- save information in your MyFavs or your Address Book
- application features business search with additional enhanced information
- Canada’s only integrated business and people Reverse Look-up Feature

Available for free. Click here to launch your iTunes.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Released over this past weekend was a very cool blackberry application from Yellow Pages Group. The application can be downloaded directly to your blackberry at InstallYP.ca/Blackberry (http://installyp.ca/blackberry) – please note that this link is blackberry specific, if you try to access through a web browser it will tell you that your devise is not supported.

This application features the leading directory services in Canada, YellowPages - for finding a business, Canada411 for finding a person, and a blended Reverse Lookup for finding both people and businesses.

Compatible with the newest blackberries and backward compatible to previous generations, this application automatically detects your device and installs the features that are compatible. For example, GPS search is enabled on devices with GPS, non GPS blackberries won’t see this option.

Lastly, the application auto detects your language settings and is available in French and English – pretty cool stuff.

Some of the high-level features include:

- tab between Business, People and Reverse Lookup
- save listing information through MyFavs or directly to your blackberry address book or both
- people search with integrated find businesses nearby (surprise your date with flowers on the way)
- GPS search (for devices where this is enabled)
- direct connect to Voice Search (no charge usage) if you are on the go

Application is completely free to download and overall is pretty cool and puts the most up to date Business and People information in Canada at your fingertips.

If you are interested, check out other neat local Canadian search applications.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The last week in Canada has been one heck of a political ride with the economic update leading to a coalition opposition looking to take power from the reigning Conservative government. If you want to read about the full week of details, check out The Globe and Mails Political section.

Got me wondering, with these 5 political leaders in a history making battle, what would Canada’s leading directories tell us about these political leaders and their names.

To recap, here are the players (there names link to Wikipedia, if you want to read more about them):

Stephan Harper, Conservative Leader and Current Prime Minister

Stéphane Dion, Liberal Leader and Proposed New Prime Minister

Jack Layton, Leader of The New Democrats

Gilles Duceppe, Leader of the Bloc Québécois

Elizabeth May, Leader of the Greens

Now that we have the players, what can we learn about their last names?

Let’s start with Canada 411, Canada’s most used people finder directory. I will conduct a search for each political leaders last name within the country and the top 2 provinces that contain that last name. Here are the results (if you want to see the full results, click on the name below):

Harper in Canada – 3150 results with the most coming from Harper in Ontario (1505) followed by Harper in British Columbia (476).

Dion in Canada – 13,042 results with the most coming from Dion in Quebec (10,979) followed by Dion in Ontario (1065).

Layton in Canada – 395 results with the most coming from Layton in Ontario (134) followed by Layton in Alberta (105).

Duceppe in Canada – 100 results with the coming from for Duceppe in Quebec (99) followed by Duceppe in Alberta (1).

May in Canada – 12,260 results with the most coming from May in Ontario (5017) followed by May in Quebec (2481).

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Now, let’s turn our focus on business searches searches using YellowPages.ca – Canada’s Most Used business directory. For these searches, we have filtered based on businesses that contain the last name of our 5 political leaders along with the top 2 most references business categories. Here are the results:

Harper in Canada – 156 results with the most common business heading being Engines-Diesel (12) and Lawyers (12) followed by General Contractors (6).

Dion in Canada – 436 results with the most common business heading being Dentists (22) followed by Auto Repair Garages (21).

Layton in Canada – 37 results with the most common business heading being Dentists (5) followed by Lawyers (3) and Roofing Contractors (3).

Duceppe in Canada – 6 results with the most common business heading being Theaters (3) followed by Lawyers (2).

May in Canada – 1734 results with the most common business heading being Lawyers (54) followed by Restaurants (50).

So there you have it, the 5 political leaders in Canada looked at from the view of Canada’s directories.

Check out Canada’s Top 20 Surnames Dissected if you are interested in more numbers.

Popularity: 3% [?]