I am mostly seeking Bars and Pubs but Restaurants are a very nice bonus. I need a database with zipcode, city, state, longitude, latitude, establishment name, establishment contact information, maybe a category with sub categories if it's restaurants as well. I found one with Oddity Software. But after closer inspection after buying it, the database was garbage. It had very long obtrusive category names and/or sub category names, that would make indexing it for any need difficult. Then it had so many entries that were not restaurants, pubs, or bars.. like auto repair centers, and a minimum of at least 80 categories/sub categories that made no sense to the type of database it claimed to be. All of which had multiple entries with that category/sub category that didn't apply.
So I see all these new sites popping up here and there trying to be like yelp or doing something completely different like I want to do. However I don't know where these people are getting their initial databases from. I thought Oddity Software would be my golden fix until I purchased it, found out what I found out about it, then they refused to discuss things further with me.
So I am wondering here today. Who knows of a database similar to that of which I seek?
Best Answer
Well here's a few:
Proper Databases (Cheap / free but of variable quality) - you will probably have to convert to mySQL yourself as this is not a standard geospatial format given its relatively poor geo extensions.
APIs (usage restrictions, generally free to a certain level of use)
It's unlikely these will have accurate opening hours, so you might need something more expensive, such as CHD Expert. I can only assume that's incredibly expensive. Unfortunately, the rule is usually you get what you pay for so I suspect most people, including the big boys, are slightly winging it with the quality of data available.