rlewis - 2:46 am on Jul 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hello, long time reader first time poster here...

I'm looking to do an all-purpose state directory that would probably include 300k listings or so of the state's businesses. And I'm having a hard time finding reliable data.

My experiences so far...

Scraping data from various Yellow Pages/Superpages, so on. This is okay for a niche directory that might have 5-10 different categories to scrape for - but for an "all-purpose" type directory there's hundreds of categories and perhaps thousands of sub-categories. Scraping is not an option.

I've purchased the entire USA database (20 million listings or so) that supposedly had Main Cat and a Sub Cat for every business for $500 or so. Unfortunately, the data was completely miss-categorized and useless.

Purchasing just an SIC code database doesn't give Sub categories. I can't have a category with 20,0000 restuarants and not have sub-categories for them for what type of restaurants they are.

After getting burned on my purchase of data I'm more than a little leary of buying data now. I used some online lead generating automated services and they quoted over $30k for the data I was looking for.

Does anyone know how we can obtain reasonably priced business data for the US that has an accurate Main Category and Sub Category?

Thank you!