API to look up business name, given a specific location?

Question

I'm really hoping there's an existing service for something like this. I have a location (could be GPS coordinates or a street address, I can use geocoding or reverse geocoding services to switch between them) and I want to find a business that's listed as being approximately at that place.

If this service doesn't already exist, I'm thinking the best way to do what I want is to get a list of businesses close to a location, go through those and single out the closest one to the point I want, and say I'm "in" it if the distance is less than such and such.

If you have some pointers for which services I should look into (for either pinpointing one business or getting a list proximate to a location) or you think my methodology is stupid, please let me know!

edit: it's looking like the yahoo local search thing can pretty much do what I want. I'm going to start tinkering with that

Answer 1

This is just a hunch, but have you checked out the Google Maps API?

Answer 2

Google Maps doesn't offer this yet. They do reverse geocoding from a lat/long to an address but not a business or interest.

I'm looking this up myself to see who offers this but the two I know of so far are GeoAPI (recently purchased by twitter) and SimpleGeo.