Many people feel nostalgic when they hear the phrase “Yellow Pages.” In 1883, a printer in one of Wyoming’s regular phone books ran out of white paper and used yellow paper instead. This is how the thick, old yellow books came to be. The first official Yellow Pages directory was finally made in 1886. As digital infrastructure and internet services spread, the Yellow Pages’ importance, which had been around for a century, slowly moved to the web. Yellowpages.com is one of the worlds best-known and biggest online business directories. It has useful information from 19 million local businesses all over the world, such as plumbers, dentists, doctors, restaurants, hotels, and more.
Some of the information could be businesses’ names, phone numbers, prices, emails, and so on. As Yellowpages.com has:
- A wealth of information about local businesses in a specific city.
- A way to find and gather information.
- It might be tough to download data in JSON, CSV, or Excel spreadsheets.
In situations like this, yellow pages data scraping saves the day. Simply put, a Yellow Page Data Extractor is a tool that automatically pulls information from different Yellow Pages company profiles without requiring you to write any code. All of this information is available to the public and can be found, scraped, and given to you in a format ready to use.
What Types Of Information Can Be Obtained From Yellow Pages?
You can find a lot of useful information organized by location on Yellowpages.com. With a good web scraping tool, you can do this. Some of the things you can get from the website are:
- Name of business
- Address of business
- Description of business
- Phone number
- Email address
- State and Postal code
- Location of business or map coordinates
- Hours of operation
- Website
- Ratings and reviews
How Can You Scrape Latitude And Longitude Values?
First of all, Yellow Pages sites like www.yellowpages.com don’t show the company’s exact location on a map (values of latitude and longitude). But you can get coordinates from the page’s HTML source. RegEx, which stands for “Regular Expressions,” is used to pull the needed section of data (the latitude and longitude values) from the page’s HTML source. Here is a list of the coordinate selection RegEx strings.
• Data-lat="([^"]*) • Data-lng="([^"]*)
You can automatically scrape coordinates and other business information from multiple Yellow Pages listings like phone, email, address, etc. like phone number, email address, etc.
How Might Scraping The Yellow Pages Help Your Business?
Yellowpages.com has been around for 125 years now. Even though it’s now on the web, it’s still an important and useful business directory that people worldwide trust. The site has a lot of information for marketing and making better choices, like email addresses, phone numbers, links to social media, locations, ratings, reviews, links to other websites, and more. Scraping data from the yellow pages can help businesses of all sizes and types in many ways. For example, it can help you build a targeted B2B email list or get in touch with specific customers to sell your products or services.
But even though data is there, you can still get it whenever you want. For example, there are millions of company profiles on Yellowpages.com, and it would take months or even years to get all the relevant information by hand. So, using a tool that automates the process by “web scraping” the data is essential. The most important reasons to choose a Yellow Page Extractor are:
- You can talk to your clients. By scraping data from Yellowpages.com, you can check customer reviews of your business and change your business plans based on what customers say.
- Scraping data from Yellowpages also lets you look at your competitors. You can see how well your business content is doing and then make the right changes to stay ahead of the curve. With the help of a Yellow Pages extractor, you can thoroughly analyze your competitors to find untapped niche markets, understand industry standards and go above and beyond them, and set your brand apart.
- The third significant benefit of scraping Yellow Pages is that you can look at other businesses’ prices for similar services. Then you can look at the deals, discounts, and sales your competitor offers. The end result is that you get more customers by providing the best deals and standing out from the crowd.
- Lastly, you can connect with people who want to buy or sell your goods or services. So, scraping data from Yellowpages.com is a great way to get leads that will always work.
Scraping the Yellow Pages: Is it legal?
Yes, getting information from Yellowpages.com seems profitable and “too good to be true.” But many businesses need to know if it’s legal or not. Scraping Yellowpages.com is legal in the same way that scraping any other website is legal. It is okay to take data from the internet that is open to the public. On the other hand, stealing private information is against the law. Private data is information protected and kept safe by international laws, authorities, or copyright. Because of this, it’s essential to be careful and watchful when scraping data from the internet. Also, it’s essential to respect the privacy of the targeted website, which in our case, is Yellowpages.com.
Web-scraping information from Yellowpages.com is legal as long as the information you scrape is legal and the process you use to get the information doesn’t exceed certain limits. You can scrape Yellow Pages with Python, but you need to know how to do it technically. Also, Yellowpages.com doesn’t have public API access. If you want API access, you have to ask them.
Wrapping It Up
That’s a quick look at how to get information from Yellowpages.com and a simple way to get location coordinates from a Yellow Pages listing. When done right, web scraping can completely change your business and make it much more profitable. A Yellow Page Extractor has many benefits, from getting leads to analyzing your competitors.
But, as we’ve already said, the process of scraping data can be challenging because it involves privacy laws, copyrights, and other details. Because of this, it’s always a good idea to get professional help when scraping data from Yellowpages.com. Experts can help you avoid many of the tricky problems during the process.
