Date: 2008feb13 Q. How is canada411.ca ? A. I can't believe how bad http://www.canada411.ca is! This is the official phone directory for Canada. It's apparently run by the major phone companies. But the performance is abysmal. It takes several minutes for the first page to draw up. And queries take even longer. Many times I have just given up and resorted to the physical phonebook or Google. But sometimes there are no alternatives. Dialing 411 costs 75 cents last I looked. It would be a fairly simple application to setup. The database is read-only so I can cached across several machines. Its very odd to me. I imagine they attempt to use their own service from time to time. Could it be that its slow on purpose? Why would they do that... - Make people pay for 411 - Slow down or stop automated program that might take the data Its something of a national embarrassment.