Good Source For Local Business Data?

[MisterT]

I'm currently looking for a good source for local business data...for a niche website that will be publishing some local business info (USA businesses) such as business name, address, business details, etc.. (basically yellow-pages/directory type information)

Can anyone recommend a good source for data like this? (paid, free, or otherwise) I know of a few companies myself, but would love to get some recommendations!

[tennis fan28]

iBegin sells their business data for $1000 a state or $50000 for all the states. infoUSA will license their data but I have no idea what the costs are but I would assume it's expensive since they are a top broker.

You could try a mailing list database that would have the name, category, phone, website, e-mail, address etc that are cheaper (make sure you check their site out to make sure they are legit) and you will almost certainly have to dedupe the content as there will be duplicate entries.

Some of these sites get their information by spidering other sites. Where they get their info and how they do it legally is something I have been trying to figure out for a while.

[MisterT]

thanks for the ideas...

from what i understand, a lot of these data companies get their data from a variety of sources - and i would guess some of them are a little shady.

i'll keep shopping around and investigating for something that is accurate, ethical, and affordable. hopefully i can find that. ;)

[tennis fan28]

It would be best if you could find a company that gives you monthly updates of changes to existing businesses or adds new busineses to the database. Only the top data brokers do this and again, it ain't cheap.

[MisterT]

Yeah, I'm sure any kind of data service that provides regular updates of adds/drops would be pretty expensive.

A one-time dump of data would get more and more inaccurate over time unfortunately...but it is possible to allow website users report/change inaccuracies etc.. rather than pay for updates? (Yelp seems to do a reasonable job of that) But again, that would be a bit tricky too.

[AhmedF]

We operate iBegin (mentioned by tennis_fan).

No promotional - just wanted to state that we do have a non-commercial database (minus phone #s + lat/lng coordinates). You are more than welcome to download the data and 'try it out' before you buy.

Oh and its 40k for the full US, not 50 :)

[edited by: AhmedF at 9:38 pm (utc) on Sep. 24, 2007]

[tennis fan28]

My apologies Ahmed, though I knew if I mentioned iBegin that you would show up at some point...now if you could just tell us where you got the information? lol.