The Easiest Site To Scrape For Leads?

[steelersfan 38]

Out of the local listings sites out there (manta,yelp,yellow pages, Yahoo Local, etc.) which is the least complicated to create scrape bots for?

 

A little background on why I am asking:

I have been working on a couple of bots (yes I'm a busy mofo lately!), a manta scraper being one of the latest. I also had plans to also make a Yelp scraper, and a YP scraper as well. After working for a while on manta, I learned about "anti bot technology", something I now loathe greatly. I also learned that these types of websites purposely design their interfaces to discourage and deter botting, in various ways. Manta in particular (a website that I had always thought to be "bootleg" and cheap, turns out to be a pretty sophisticated and powerful company!) has made scraping for lead info a pain in the rear and a convoluted process. So, before I venture into Yelp and YP, I would like to know which has less problems associated with scraping for leads and hopefully less annoying roadblocks.

 

For example, I have already seen that Yelp has a similar area input mechanism that will not allow just inputting an area and clicking (much like manta has), so there will have to be a way around this, which is troublesome. And I have found that YP has a pretty good layout of the business information, but I haven't looked into it's operations. I was hoping that others here who have experience with scraping and perhaps these sites, could shed a bit of light on my dilemma.

 

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to vote if you have the experience!

 

 

[Heiio 5]

I use to use Fminer to scrape sites but I have given up when I saw that  only the first 10 or 20 pages were returning data I can use later. The rest of the "company profiles" were only company names with a "claim your profile" button

Have you tried t scrape Kompass ?

[steelersfan 38]

Hmm kompass looks pretty easy, but I just glanced and could be wrong. I have never heard of it until now, thanks for that!

 

I used fminer a long time ago, before I found ubot, I prefer ubot now, for obvious reasons.

 

Which sites gave you the crappy "claim your business" issue?

[Heiio 5]

I have a long list of directories I have scraped ( I was only looking for website urls ) , Kompass is the most complete one. I can share the list if you wish.

Let me know if you scrape from Kompass...