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What kind of software allows you to list all businesses located in a specific suburb? I am thinking of a web scraper that will scrape a google search (of businesses in a suburb) but maybe there is another option I am not aware of?

I am looking to find out the following information:

  • Business Name
  • Business Type/Industry
  • Business email contact

I am considering using Scrapy to crawl a google search results page. The problem is determining the business name, industry. Email addresses can easily be found by using regular expressions but industry and business name is harder. I could use Google's Prediction API to 'learn' where this information is generally located (in HTML tags - eg. <h1>, etc.) but I am hoping there could be existing software or even websites that can already do this. Having a website like Yelp could be another way of scraping because the business name is always located in the same location of the page.

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    Isn't that tool called "Yellow Pages", and searchable itself? Companies usually have phone numbers, and want to be found – so they're usually listed there.
    – Izzy
    Commented Mar 14, 2015 at 12:23
  • Are you aware of our sister site, Open Data ?
    – Mawg
    Commented Oct 22, 2018 at 9:45
  • Btw, Google strongly disapproves of scraping their data (or even caching it; they require you to make a fresh request every time), so, if you intend to make money with this, you may be inviting a lawsuit
    – Mawg
    Commented Dec 16, 2019 at 14:01

2 Answers 2

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I created a GoogleMap crawler years ago called Fantail.

Give it a shot and let me know if you need help.

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Having a website like Yelp could be another way of scraping because the business name is always located in the same location of the page.

You are close to the deal. I recommend you to get any scraping software (some of them have free options), plug in a proxy service and scrape against business directories (yellow pages, white pages, etc.). See tips and tricks.

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