Local Business Intelligence

Discover local businesses for any keyword and location from public sources (Bing Maps worldwide, Yellow Pages US), de-duplicated into clean canonical records — and optionally monitor the market between runs to flag newly appeared and disappeared businesses.

What does this Actor do?

1. Discovery — searches Bing Maps and/or Yellow Pages for your keyword near a city / state / postal code / country.
2. De-duplication — merges records that refer to the same business (by name + website/phone/address) into one canonical entry.
3. Change monitoring (optional) — compares the current result set against the previous run (stored in the Apify key-value store) and marks each business isNew, plus emits a summary with newCount / removedCount.

Runs on the Apify platform with proxy rotation, scheduling, API access and dataset export built in.

Why use it?

• Build and maintain a fresh local-business directory for a market.
• Get alerted to new entrants (competitors, prospects, acquisition targets) by scheduling the Actor and reading the isNew flag.

How to use it

1. Enter a keyword (e.g. coffee shop) and a location (city, state, postalCode, country).
2. Choose your sources and a maxResults cap.
3. Turn on Monitor new businesses and schedule the Actor to track the market over time.

Input

Field	Type	Description
keyword	string (required)	Business category/keyword to search.
country / state / city / postalCode	string	Where to search.
sources	array	bing_maps, yellowpages (default bing_maps).
maxResults	integer	Max businesses to return (default 100).
monitorNewBusinesses	boolean	Flag new/removed vs. the previous run (default false).
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings (residential US recommended for Yellow Pages).

Input example

{
  "keyword": "coffee shop",
  "city": "Austin",
  "state": "TX",
  "country": "USA",
  "sources": ["bing_maps"],
  "maxResults": 100,
  "monitorNewBusinesses": true
}

Output

One record per business plus, when monitoring is on, a monitoringSummary record.

Field	Description
business / name	Business name.
category	Category.
address, city, state, country	Location.
phone, email, website	Contact details.
rating, reviewCount	Public review signals.
latitude, longitude, coordinates	Geo coordinates.
sourceUrl, source	Where the record came from.
isNew	Only when monitoring: true if not seen in the previous run.

Output example

{
  "business": "Radio Coffee",
  "category": "coffee shop",
  "address": "1 Main St",
  "city": "Austin",
  "state": "TX",
  "phone": "(512) 555-0100",
  "website": "https://radiocoffee.com",
  "rating": 4.7,
  "reviewCount": 812,
  "latitude": 30.24,
  "longitude": -97.77,
  "coordinates": { "latitude": 30.24, "longitude": -97.77 },
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.bing.com/maps",
  "source": "bing_maps",
  "isNew": true
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Monitoring & state

• With monitorNewBusinesses enabled, the current result set is snapshotted in the Apify key-value store (namespaced per keyword + location). The next run diffs against it — isNew marks entrants and a monitoringSummary reports newCount and removedCount.
• The first run marks every business isNew (nothing to compare against yet).

Sources & configuration

• Bing Maps — worldwide, no browser, fast.
• Yellow Pages — US only; needs a US residential proxy in practice.
• Environment variables — none required. Apify Proxy password is injected by the platform.

Local execution

pip install -r requirements.txt
# put input in storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json
python src/main.py