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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!
OBTW, you didn't define "reasonably priced business data".
What amount do you deem "reasonable" for the data you are describing?
