Where do data providers get their data?

Such as Acxiom and InfoUSA...

[JeremyL]

Where do companies like Acxiom and InfoUSA get their information they resell to the search providers? Getting info updated by Acxiom and InfoUSA is a slow and painfull process so I am looking at becoming proactive and geting the info correct before it gets to the data providers. At first I thought maybe they were getting their information from business licenses. Then I started working with a company that has about 30 locations and does not get a seperate license for each location, and each location does end up listed in search engines like YL and GL. So the only thing I can think of is the business phone lines.

[bakedjake]

Most key in data from the phonebooks. Costa Rica is a big location for that sort of work.

[Chicago]

InfoUSA

We employ over 600 full time people to compile and update the databases from thousands of public sources such as yellow pages...

For the business database, we make over 20 million phone calls a year to verify the name of the owner or key executive, their address, number of employees, number of PC's, fax numbers, e-mail addresses and other information.

[JeremyL]

So on a side note. If I update our phone lines that are already in place to "company name - unique name" will the data providers end up updating their info without me working on it? Also in turn, will google, overture, and such get an update list?

[dh3325]

We purchased a "double keyed" list of our local phone book yellow pages last year from Acxiom which was promised to be 99% accurate and what we got was the worst mess of names I have seen in 4 years of purchasing these type of lists. Names and addresses were misspelled, missing completely and several other problems. All told I spent over 200 hours cleaning up the mess for 12,000+ names. It is my assumption that what I got was a simple list of names and addresses that had been spidered off the web rather than keyed. This year I have several people working with our dataset, which is continually being updated by my sales staff and just plan detective work, to update from the new phonebook rather than by another list. We are also negotiating with SBC to receive adds and deletes for our market. We are able to do this with Qwest who is very easy to work with but SBC in its typical fashion is a pain to deal with.

This explains why the major Local SOs and IYPs have rather out of date information. I know what it takes to do upkeep on our data, how someone would do it nationally is beyond me. On the other hand it makes a great selling feature for our directory vs the big boys.

[mypages]

We started out getting a phone book at a time keypunched in China. We found that to be labor intensive just to get directories, make sure that they were shipped to where they needed to be, etc.

So we were thrilled to find Acxiom data available. We tossed out our own data, gathered at considerable expense. Think we were paying $.05/listing.

It was only later that disillusionment set in. There are businesses who've been around for quite a while (over a year) not listed. And businesses who've been gone for quite a while still listed.

The InfoUSA data seems to be very good, though not perfect. We've found omissions and errors in it, too. But it's also considerably more expensive. So we went with Acxiom.