Where can I find business address list/databases for free

March 9, 2007 12:12 PM

I need to populate a database of a Google Maps mashup with the names and addresses of restaurants in the U.S. and Canada. Where can I find this info in digital form?

I need just the basics: name, full address and phone. Bonuses would include restaurant type.

I am willing to pay for a commercial database, but many are for direct mail type campaigns and I'm not sure if their user licenses allow you to republish. I'd also be willing to purchase a list of all businesses that includes an industry field.

Ideally I would love to find something free and up-to-date. I don't mind doing a little work to format the data. I am willing to pay for the information, but want quality information if I'm going to drop the money.

I have contacted the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association (CRFA) who has this info for Canada, but they haven't replied.

posted by dripdripdrop to shopping (4 comments total)

Screenscrape the yellowpages.ca?
posted by y10k at 1:03 PM on March 9, 2007

ChefMoz is free but of extremely variable quality. In an area with an active editor, it can be quite fresh and accurate. In other areas, you'll have patchy data that's not been updated in five years.

Their RDF dumps are kind of buggy, too; you'll need to preprocess them a little before they're valid XML.
posted by hattifattener at 1:18 PM on March 9, 2007

I would think thats going to be a pretty difficult thing to get, especially to get it to be fairly accurate. I mean, you want ALL restaurants in the USA and Canada?... that'd be quite a few restaurants.

I'm doing something like that just for my town, using www.communitywalk.com , but its going to take me atleast a couple months to input all the data and format it like I want.
posted by jmnugent at 5:56 PM on March 9, 2007

Maybe you can create a Yahoo pipe that searches Yahoo Local listings with a query by zip and establishment name.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

I've been meaning to look into this for a while, post back and let me know how it goes if you try it.
posted by zackola at 8:59 AM on March 10, 2007