With the recent changes made at Yelp scraping them has become that much harder. Extra hoops to jump though and slower scraping are going to be a problem for many of my customers. To those of you who have relied on Yelp for your business I would like to offer a alternative. Yahoo Local.

Yahoo Local my be one of the least used scrapers included with Local Scraper but that is only because no one thinks about them for data not because they have bad data. Did you actually know that Yahoo pulled the majority of their data from Yelp? Even the reviews on their listings are taken directly from Yelp. Here are the details we currently get from Yahoo Local.

• Name
• Address, City, State, Zip
• Cross Street
• Neighborhood
• Phone
• Fax
• Rating
• Reviews
• Description
• Website
• Merchant Verified
• Paid Listing
• Hours
• Attire
• Parking
• Accepts Credit Cards
• Ambience
• Wifi
• Listing E-Mail
• Review Text 1
• Review Text 2
• Review Text 3
• Review Text 4
• Review Text 5
• Latitude
• Longitude
• Feature Photo
• Listing URL

Do some of these details look familiar? Parking, Ambience, Wifi? These are detailed taken from Yelp.com! Over the next week I am going to focus on Yahoo Local and make sure I add even more details to the scraper. Yahoo Local has the same data the Yelp does but with out the new protections and at the speed of our original scraper. Yahoo Local even supports international results from the UK!

Local Scraper has not lost its Yelp data, we just need to focus on getting it from another location until we see the final changes at Yelp.com. So if your business is still after Yelp data try out the Yahoo Local scraper you just might be surprised.