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It looks like this is targeted at ML/AI but I have a tangentially related question: does anyone know of open source or other publicly available lists of US busi

It looks like this is targeted at ML/AI but I have a tangentially related question: does anyone know of open source or other publicly available lists of US businesses? Just business name and address? I’m building out an app and we receive documents from all kinds of vendors from all over the country. The app is for our business to manage our client data. I was hoping to find a list of business I could throw in the db rather then piecemeal add the addresses in one by one as the documents come in. I looked at some of the data service providers (infoUsa I think was one and d&b being another), but one dataset for just business names and addresses they were asking $50,000 for. I think my use-case is unique in that these companies typically sell this data as sales lead data which it definitely is not in my case (we don’t even sell b2b). Anyone know of anything like this? I suppose I could just scrape phone books but I think if I can’t find the data we will just resort to one by one entry.

jedieaston 7y ago
It’s been a minute since I looked at the docs, but could you use the Google Maps API for this (or perhaps OpenStreetMap)? You could query all of the POI categories for a city/state/country and save the addresses and names. Might be something, unless you need the legal name of the business rather than whatever they make public.
- obituary_latte 7y ago
  Legal names aren't critical but would be nice. I think that if the business posts the name that would be close enough. Very interesting idea - many thanks!
joshstrange 7y ago
You might be better off just using Google Maps Places API. IDK the traffic levels for your app but depending on your usecase it might be much easier to just use Google's API instead of trying to maintain a list yourself.
trystero 7y ago
OpenCorporates is a a good source for that, and it's open data (unlike Google Maps): https://api.opencorporates.com/documentation/API-Reference https://api.opencorporates.com/documentation/API-Reference

jedieaston 7y ago

It’s been a minute since I looked at the docs, but could you use the Google Maps API for this (or perhaps OpenStreetMap)? You could query all of the POI categories for a city/state/country and save the addresses and names. Might be something, unless you need the legal name of the business rather than whatever they make public.

obituary_latte 7y ago
Legal names aren't critical but would be nice. I think that if the business posts the name that would be close enough. Very interesting idea - many thanks!

joshstrange 7y ago

You might be better off just using Google Maps Places API. IDK the traffic levels for your app but depending on your usecase it might be much easier to just use Google's API instead of trying to maintain a list yourself.

trystero 7y ago

OpenCorporates is a a good source for that, and it's open data (unlike Google Maps): https://api.opencorporates.com/documentation/API-Reference https://api.opencorporates.com/documentation/API-Reference