How can I automate "white pages" lookups?

December 1, 2006 8:53 AM

Is there a free (or cheap) API or public database that can be used for "white pages" lookups?

I have a list of the names of about 500 people who live in a small 3-city area, and I've been given the assignment of basically looking up their exact address, and sorting them into categories based on what sub-region they live in. Is there a way I can do this programatically? I know I can do it manually using something like whitepages.com and Google Maps, but that seems really tedious. I'd like to be able to write an application that will look up the person's address using their name and the city they live in (I have that information already), and from there I can probably use the Google Maps API to get an approximate enough location. Does anyone know of an API or public database that my application can use to look this information up? Thanks in advance!

posted by Vorteks to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Many of the lookup programs will let you ask for everyone in a particular zip code. Then you can cut and paste from the results.

500 isn't such a large number. You could probably do it in a day or at most 2 days.
posted by KRS at 11:30 AM on December 1, 2006

Your data is pretty simple that you could write a Perl script to just scrape the white page address output.
posted by mphuie at 12:18 PM on December 1, 2006

I could probably write a Greasemonkey script to do this in an hour or 2. If you are not familiar with GM then doing it by hand would probably be faster than getting up to speed on GM.


One question? Whitepages lists 18 "John Jones" in my city. What would you do in this case?
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 4:38 PM on December 1, 2006

I have no idea why, but writing a script to parse the data from whitepages.com simply didn't occur to me. It seems pretty obvious in retrospect. I think I'm going to try that. I just hope they don't have any filters that would stop me after 50 requests or something.
posted by Vorteks at 10:51 PM on December 2, 2006