How can I collect restaurant listings from the web?

You can collect restaurant listings from the web in a few common ways, depending on your goal and the site’s rules:

1) Use official APIs

Many platforms provide APIs with structured restaurant data:

• Google Places API
• Yelp Fusion API
• OpenStreetMap / Overpass API
• TripAdvisor or other partner APIs

This is usually the cleanest and most reliable option.

2) Web scraping

If there’s no API and the site’s terms allow it, you can scrape restaurant pages:

• Use HTTP requests for static pages
• Use browser automation for dynamic pages

Common tools:

• Python: requests, BeautifulSoup, lxml
• Dynamic sites: Selenium, Playwright

Typical steps:

1. Find listing pages and detail pages
2. Extract fields like name, address, phone, rating, cuisine, hours
3. Handle pagination / infinite scroll
4. Store results in CSV, JSON, or a database

3) Use search engines and directories

You can collect from:

• Google Maps
• Yelp
• OpenStreetMap
• Local business directories

Often you can combine multiple sources to improve coverage.

4) Buy or license data

For large-scale or commercial use, data vendors may sell restaurant datasets.

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Important considerations

• Check the site’s Terms of Service and robots.txt
• Avoid collecting personal data unless you have a lawful basis
• Respect rate limits and don’t overload servers
• Expect duplicates and inconsistent formatting

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Simple scraping example in Python

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "https://example.com/restaurants"
html = requests.get(url, headers={"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"}).text
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")

for card in soup.select(".restaurant-card"):
    name = card.select_one(".name").get_text(strip=True)
    address = card.select_one(".address").get_text(strip=True)
    print(name, address)

If you want, I can also show you:

• how to scrape a specific site,
• how to do it with Python,
• or how to store the data in CSV/SQLite.