How to find thousands of company names?

Question

How can I find or generate thousands of company names for testing and demo purposes? (Address, phone number, and related information would be nice too.)

I've got a system I'm building which includes business contact information. Pretty common no doubt.

My test/demo database currently has randomly generated individual's names loaded (thanks to a handy IRS spreadsheet I found). This has worked great for internal testing and review purposes, but it looks really odd when shown to prospective customers.

I've tried various online public information sources (e.g. EDGAR, and county based property records searches), but these all require me to manually stitch together the results in blocks of 50 names or so at a time. I could do this, but was really hoping for a search service or data store out there that had this type of information readily searchable and retrievable in very large batches.

Answer 1

I use Fake Name generator (http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/).

Answer 2

You could scrape a public source like Wikipedia for names, or you could just grab random (non-offensive, of course) nouns from your dictionary of choice (/usr/share/dict/words, etc.) and append "Company", "Corporation", "LTD" at random.

Answer 3

I personally STRONGLY recommend against using ACTUAL data of any form for testing/demoing an application.

I have had to go in too many times and pick up the pieces when real e-mail addresses were used and emails accidentally went out to all kinds of customers.

I would use something like the tools from RedGate to add data, make it dummy data, real data is too risky, at least in my opinion.

Answer 4

If you are simply looking to generate names, I would use one of the two above options. If you are looking for more complex data, Redgate makes a SQL data generator. I have never used this program, I simply know of its existence.

Answer 5

I would suggest having a "random character" generator that strings together "company name" "companytype" and so forth. This will minimize the chance of actually displaying a real company's name.

Also, check out the Ipsum Lorum generators; they might have some tips.

Answer 6

A pretty good generator is: generatedata.

It's very customizable: you can generate names, streets, telephone numbers, a random entry from a specified list.

You can export the generated data in different formats like: SQL, HTML, Excel, XML and CSV.