Yellow Pages Scraper

Yellow Pages Scraper

Yellow Pages Scraper is an Apify actor for scraping information from Yellow Pages listings. It allows you to search records based on a combination of search term and location or a list of URLs. It is build on top of Apify SDK and you can run it both on Apify platform and locally.

• Input
• Output
• Compute units consumption
• Extend output function

Input

Field	Type	Description	Default value
search	string	Query string to be searched on the site	"Dentist"
location	string	Location string to search the records in	"Los Angeles"
startUrls	array	List of Request objects that will be deeply crawled. The URL can be any Yellowpages.com record list page	none
maxItems	number	Maximum number of pages that will be scraped	200
extendOutputFunction	string	Function that takes a Cheerio object and a Cheerio representation of the record element ($, record) as arguments and returns data that will be merged with the default output. More information in Extend output function	($, record) => { return {}; }
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings of the run. If you have access to Apify proxy, you can set { "useApifyProxy": true" } to enable proxy usage	{ "useApifyProxy": false }

Either the search and location attributes or the startUrls atrribute has to be set.

Output

Output is stored in a dataset. Each item is information about a record.

{
  "isAd": true,
  "url": "https://www.yellowpages.com/compton-ca/mip/golden-state-dental-group-18768214?lid=1001760866489",
  "name": "Golden State Dental Group",
  "address": "1601 N Long Beach Blvd, Compton, CA 90221",
  "phone": "(310) 507-7718",
  "rating": 4,
  "ratingCount": 6,
  "infoSnippet": "*Please contact us for more information",
  "image": "https://i4.ypcdn.com/blob/00a40d49e577606be9d82ced5404696022a7e2a0",
  "categories": [
    "Dentists",
    "Implant Dentistry",
    "Pediatric Dentistry",
    "Periodontists",
    "Cosmetic Dentistry"
  ]
}

Please note that not all of the attributes will be present with all the results.

Compute units consumption

Keep in mind that it is much more efficient to run one longer scrape (at least one minute) than more shorter ones because of the startup time.

The average consumption is about 0.04 Compute unit per 2000 results scraped.

Extend output function

You can use this function to update the default output of this actor. This function takes a Cheerio object and a Cheerio representation of the record element ($, record) as arguments, so you can choose which other attributes you would like to add. The output from this function will get merged with the default output.

The return value of this function has to be an object!

You can return fields to achieve 3 different things:

• Add a new field - Return object with a field that is not in the default output
• Change a field - Return an existing field with a new value
• Remove a field - Return an existing field with a value undefined

($, record) => {
    return {
        directionsLink: record.find('.directions').attr('href'),
        rating: 5,
        phone: undefined,
    }
}

This example will add a new field directionsLink, change the rating field and remove the phone field

Epilogue

Thank you for trying my actor. You can send any feedback you have to my email cermak.petr6@gmail.com.
If you find any bug, please create an issue on the Github page.