There is going to be a public White/Yellow API some time next year - in the meantime you can probably safely do as suggested, and migrate once there's an API. (In theory you could get blocked, but if you are just looking for individual businesses, not scraping, I doubt anyone would notice / care)
Disclaimer: while I work at Sensis, this is purely conjecture, and I am not in any way condoning this sort of heinous activity. Just suggesting that in theory, it would probably work just fine... and once there is an official API (assuming the T&Cs are sane, I have no idea what the T&Cs are going to be) you have a simple migration path. - Korny On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Matthew Vickers <[email protected]>wrote: > On 5/12/10 6:53 AM, Gregory McIntyre wrote: > >> Anyone have any ideas on the best way to take business names and turn >> them into addresses of those businesses, via web API, scraping or any >> other means? >> >> Assuming the business name is Australian I would start with the White > Pages. Using mechanic a simple get request, some xpath and or nokogiri > should yield the > address you need. > > For instance you can grab the New South Wales Bar Association's address > from the following URL. > http://www.whitepages.com.au/busSearch.do?subscriberName=NSW Bar > Association&location= > > They also use some sort of autocomplete at > > http://www.whitepages.com.au/autosuggest/autoSuggest.x > > Not sure how useful that would be. > > Hope this helps. > > Matt. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<rails-oceania%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en. > > -- Kornelis Sietsma korny at my surname dot com http://korny.info "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of" -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en.
