google web api question...

[Antilles Prime]

ok, I registered with google for an account to test out their web api / webservices, and it worked pretty cool and all, but I noticed one thing; the phone directory information does not come back in the results for the same query where it normally would using the main google search interface. Now, it is entirely possible that those results come back in a special collection or something, but I am unable to find it. I have emailed the support for the google web api, and searched the google newsgroups, and have seen other people there with the same problem, and no one has answered them. I heard there were Google Gurus(TM) here, so, I present my question here.

ideas? Even if it werent implemented, it couldnt take more than an hour or 2 to dump that data to the results. Seems pretty simple. Is there some other reason that the data is not being sent?

the reason i want this data is that i want to format the results via my public webserver so that my (spv smartphone) phone's browser can use them via having the phone numbers linked with the proper protocol links (tel://) so that when you click on them in the phone's mini browser (ie4), the phone will dial the number. so. basically, its a super phone directory for my smartphone. (if it had voice recognition, then you could just saw 'call Google', and it would dynamically go out and find google's phone number and dial it, without you giving it a second thought.) Its a nice idea, and not something super incredible, as anyone could format the links that way... just a idea ive been tinkering with. If anyone else knows a free web service where i could get similar data in a similar way, I'd like to know about it. Ive looked high and low for one...

[dpplgngr]

You would fare better asking this question here:

[groups.google.com...]

[Jenstar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], Antilles Prime!

Phone number queries are not returned when using Google API. I'm not sure why, but it might be due to privacy reasons.

[Antilles Prime]

yes, but what about businesses? they WANT you to know their phone numbers, and thats what i was primarily after...

[Jenstar]

It unfortunately will not return any phone numbers, whether they are business or residential.

[celerityfm]

Antilles- welcome to WebmasterWorld! Great idea by the way-- I especially like the voice dialing concept!

In any case, its a shame that Google doesn't return those results when using the API but, perhaps you could scrape those results off of a website that allows such a thing?

You might want to checkout a great article posted here - [unixreview.com...] where they discuss the finer points of webscraping using Python-- but the ideas can be applied to nearly any other language (perl is another popular scraping tech).

Maybe Google doesn't have the ability to differentiate between businesses and people and therefore don't put that data in the API... (they are already putting it on the web anyways so its kindof confusing here).

GoogleGuy-- can you shed light on this? Perhaps we are missing something here?