📇 Canada411.ca Contact Scraper Actor

Automatically extract business or personal contact information from Canada411.ca

🌟 What Does This Actor Do?

This Apify actor automates the process of extracting contact information from Canada411.ca. It:

1. Starts from a search results URL you provide.

2. Paginates through all available result pages.

3. Extracts contact details such as:

   • 🧑 Name
   • ☎️ Phone Number
   • 🏠 Address
   • 🔗 Source Profile URL

All data is stored in the Apify dataset and can be exported to JSON, CSV, Excel, or any other supported format.

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🛠️ Input Configuration

Provide the following fields to control scraping:

1. start_urls (Required)

List of Canada411 search URLs to scrape. Example format:

[
  { "url": "https://www.canada411.ca/search/?stype=si&what=john&where=montreal" },
  { "url": "https://www.canada411.ca/search/?stype=si&what=alex&where=toronto" }
]

2. max_pages (Optional)

Maximum number of pages to scrape per URL.

• null or 0: scrape all available pages
• 3: scrape only first 3 pages for each start_url

3. max_concurrency (Optional)

Maximum concurrent page scraping operations per search URL. Default: 20

4. proxy_url (Optional)

Custom proxy URL string. If not provided, the actor will use Apify’s Proxy service.

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🧠 Features

• ✅ Automatic Pagination — Follows "Next" links until all results are fetched or page limit is reached
• ✅ Concurrent Processing — Scrapes multiple start URLs and paginated pages in parallel
• ✅ Fault Tolerance — Handles and logs request failures, timeouts, and page errors gracefully
• ✅ Modular Structure — Easy to extend for extracting more fields

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📦 Output Format

Scraped data is stored in an Apify dataset. Each contact includes:

{
  "name": "Alex Tremblay",
  "phone": "416-555-1234",
  "address": "123 Example St, Toronto, ON",
  "source_url": "https://www.canada411.ca/res/..."
}

You can download the data in:

• 📄 CSV/Excel — Tabular format for business use
• 🧾 JSON — Ideal for API pipelines or development
• 🧠 JSONL / XML / Parquet — Advanced formats via Apify's export tools

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🔁 Example Input

{
  "start_urls": [
    { "url": "https://www.canada411.ca/search/?stype=si&what=dentist&where=calgary" }
  ],
  "max_pages": 5,
  "max_concurrency": 10
}

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🚀 Use Cases

• 📞 Building B2B or B2C contact lists
• 🏥 Scraping local professionals (e.g. doctors, lawyers, dentists)
• 🧼 Lead generation for cleaning, plumbing, and service businesses
• 📍 Researching regional contact density