How to Extract Information from Yellowpages
Yellowpages.com is an incredibly powerful way to search for local businesses in a particular city, county, or state and it contains all the relevant information such as phone numbers, addresses, business names, etc. by simply specifying a search term and location in the search bar. For example, you go to yellowpages.com and search for lawyers in Atlanta, GA as shown below.
We get the relevant search results with physical addresses, phone numbers, websites, etc. as shown below.
Hence, scraping Yellowpages results is commonly done to research competitors, lead generation, and other sales, marketing, and outreach activities. In this post, we will list out all the ways of scraping Yellowpages which requires no coding at all.
Easiest Method: Managed Web Scraping
Well, this one is particularly a no brainer; simply hire an experienced web scraping freelancer if want the data quickly without going through the hassle and the messiness of coding a scraper yourself. It’s pretty affordable since it’ll cost you about $20–30 to get extracted data from Yellowpages, however, it’s key to hire a good freelancer with a proven track record to do this or your results may vary.
Web Scraping Platforms
These are mainly software as a service (SAAS) tools that let you get scraped information from websites such as Yellowpages by simply clicking the content you want to scrape. Examples include Octoparse, Parsinghub, Scrapinghub, and Scrapehero. Its user-friendliness makes it an attractive choice for many people, however, outside of the limited free tier, their pricing starts at about $130/month which is cost-prohibitive compared to simply hiring a freelancer or using one of the methods described below.
Easy Method: Yellowpage Extraction API (Free)
Yellowpage Extraction API is a great option if you want to get extracted information for free. signup with Algorithmia but it’s free (no credit card required) and you get 10,000 free credits which are more than enough for thousands of API calls a month.
Once you are signed in and in the console, simply edit out the search term (presently set to “doctors”) to something you want, and edit the location (“set to “Atlanta, GA”) and click on run example. Once you get the result on the right pane; click on “copy” above to copy the JSON file.
Now, you will need to convert the JSON text you just copied into a CSV file. To do that, you will need to go to a JSONtoCSV converter and paste the JSON text to the top box circled in red. Once you preview that the extraction looks OK, simply download the results by clicking on “Download CSV”.
So in a couple of minutes, you exported all the results from the Yellowpages result page into a CSV file (shown below) without knowing about any coding.
Of course, if you need, you can call this API using a client in Python, Javascript, C#, Java, etc. and integrate it with your application or a database; I avoided talking about that since we promised that we will not do any coding at all in this post.
Originally published at http://www.specrom.com.
