Locating Businesses by Latitude and Longitude (API?/Webservice?)

Question

I am looking for a free database (csv, tab delimited, xml, etc) or even a web service or API which will allow me to query for business listings within a certain distance of a latitude and longitude.

A global scope would be perfect, but I would settle for Canada/US information.

Does anyone know of anything like this?

Answer 1

Google AJAX search API offers this kind of service (local search) if you use the Google Maps API, see http://code.google.com/intl/fr/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/

Apparently Yahoo! does too (see http://developer.yahoo.com/search/local/localSearch.html), if you do not plan a commercial use.

Answer 2

If you want to do this right, here is what you need:

• Database of all locations, with long/lat coords
• Database of all businesses
• Address --> long/lat conversion system, if your business database is not already geocoded

I can't help you out with the business database, but here is a good resource for the "all locations" database:

http://www.geobytes.com/freeservices.htm

(Scroll down to the bottom of the page - you're looking for "GeoWorldMap".)

It contains a set of text files that are designed to be imported into a relational database. It's the most complete (free) resource that I've been able to find for this sort of task.