find_business Search

Finds contact information for a business, based on location and either name or category.

Syntax

http://api.whitepages.com/find_business/1.0/?parameter_list;api_key=API_KEYVAL

where parameter_list signifies one or more parameter=value entries separated by semicolons and API_KEYVAL is the API key value you received when you registered.

Parameters

Parameters can appear in any order. Parameter names are case-sensitive; parameter values case-insensitive. For example "lastname=smith" matches "Smith", but "Lastname=smith" is not a valid parameter assignment, since the parameter name is (all lower case) lastname and not (capitalized) Lastname.

Parameter	Required?	Notes	Example
businessname	yes	See Note about required parameters	businessname=a1%20pizza
category	yes	See Note about required parameters	category=pizza
house	no	The `house` parameter is the house number	house=400
street	no	the `street` parameter is the street name, including any directional prefix or suffix	street=maple%20st
city	no		city=seattle
state	no	USPS two-character abbreviation	state=wa
zip	no	will accept 5 digit ZIP Code or 9 digit ZIP+4	zip=98101
areacode	no		areacode=206
metro	no	Whether to expand the search to the metro area. The default value is 0 (false) which means searches are not expanded to metro area by default.	metro=1

Notes

Note that either the businessname or the category parameter is required. In most cases, we recommend providing as much information as you have since that will give better results and faster response. However, only one of the parameters businessname or category should be supplied, as searches with both of these parameters will generally not produce results.

Note that the usual address line spans two parameters. The house number is separated from the street name. For a typical address such as 2468 East Main St, this would make the house parameter 2468 and the street parameter "East Main St". Of course, spaces in the street name should be encoded as %20 for passing over HTTP, so the street parameter as passed to the API would be "East%20Main%20St"

The metro parameter is a Boolean value where 1 signifies true or 0 signifies false. It specifies whether to expand the search to include the metropolitan area around the specified city parameter value.

If a find_business search using a categroy parameter is ambiguous, the return will be a picklist of possible categories.

Limitations

A find_business search will return at most 20 listings using a WhitePages Pro API Test Account. Additional listings may be available by following one of the URLs returned as links with a successful search.

Example

The following example specifies a search for Pizza businesses in Seattle, Washington.

http://api.whitepages.com/find_business/1.0/?category=pizza;city=seattle;state=wa;api_key=API_KEYVAL