Easy way to collect address and places?

Need a fast way to collect data on a certain kind of place.

[BlueGhost]

Hello all, i am starting a community site targeted to a certain kind of place, and i wanted to know if there was a easy way of finding this data besides finding some kind of list made by someone else on a website.

Like is there a way that i can access all of googles directory? The kind of information i would need is address, phone number, description, hours,and anything else. This would be a kind of store, not people personally. Any information would really help me. I hope i explained this well enough. Once i get this data i will build a community around it, hopefully. There are thousands and thousands of this places and i really dont want to do this state by state, but i will if i have to.

If there isnt a program, maybe someone can mention a technique, like just searching google and having an excell spreadsheet open and manually copying or writing each place. This is going to be a very time consuming project and i want to try to save as much time as possible, THANKS!

[edited by: BlueGhost at 5:16 am (utc) on Jan. 12, 2008]

[rogerd]

You can buy business address lists from a variety of vendors - often, these can be targeted very specifically by location (of course), industry, number of employees, etc. Credit reporting companies, mail list vendors, etc. all offer this kind of info. Their TOS, though, would probably prevent you from republishing it (if that's your intention). If you just wanted to contact potential members, advertisers, etc., that data would be perfect.

Scraping info published online might work, but of course would run afoul of most sites' TOS and also involve some copyright issues if you wanted to publish it yourself. Directories have some legal loopholes related to the copyrightability of the data, but check with an attorney who knows intellectual property law before scraping and republishing someone else's data.