[Genealib] English Front-End for Bezeq's Israeli Phone Directory

[Joy Rich]

Forwarded on behalf of Steve 
Morse 
(http://www.stevemorse.org)

Bezeq's website has changed 
recently and it is more 
usable, although it's still 
not as
good as it was originally.

Originally they would show you 
an initial batch of hits and 
would let you keep requesting
more hits until you got all 
those satisfying your 
requirements.  But a while ago 
they
changed it so that they only 
give you five hits, and they 
expect you to enter the city 
and
street if you want to narrow 
it down to a specific hit.  Of 
course if you knew the city
and street you wouldn't need 
their webpage to search for 
the person.

The change they just made 
allows you to get 15 initial 
hits instead of 5.  They still
don't let you get additional 
hits unless you narrow down 
your search by city and 
street,
but they do make it easier for 
you to enter the city and 
street.  So things are a bit
better, although it's still 
far from being as useful as it 
was originally.

Consequently I have 
resurrected my one-step form 
that allows you to use the 
bezeq site in
English.  It's where it used 
to be -- in the 
foreign-alphabets section of 
my
http://www.stevemorse.org 
website.

The features of my form are 
the following:

1. My search form is entirely 
in English (with Hebrew 
translations for
convenience of Hebrew-speaking 
users),  whereas the bezeq 
search form
which is entirely in Hebrew 
and unusable by 
English-speaking users.

2. You can enter the name, 
street, or city in Latin 
letters and have
them transliterated into the 
hebrew letters required by 
bezeq.  If you
use the bezeq site directly, 
you need to have a Hebrew 
keyboard in order
to type theose items in Hebrew 
letters.

3. You can select the city 
from a list rather than having 
to type in the
name of the city.  If you use 
the bezeq site directly, you 
must type in
the city name.

4. The bezeq site gives the 
results entirely in Hebrew. 
My site
translates and transliterates 
the results into English as 
appropriate.
Specifically, the first and 
last names in each result 
found are
transliterated into English, 
and the original Hebrew 
spelling is
displayed as well.  The city 
in each result is translated 
(not
transliterated) into English. 
And the names of the specific 
telecom
company searched are 
translated into English.

5. If you use the bezeq site 
directly, each result contains 
links to get
the phone number and map.  But 
of course these links are in 
Hebrew.  My
result page also contains 
these links, but they are in 
English.

-- Steve
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