Impressive service provides rich data on nearly every business in U.S., other countries

Want to find out how many large supermarkets are located within 5 miles of a given address?  Or how much each of the barbershops in Harlem did in sales last year?  Or how many employees each of the banks in Chicago’s South Side has?  Or how about the credit rating of all small retail shops in South Central Los Angeles?   Or the number of Lutheran churches in Minneapolis with more than two personal computers?  Check out ReferenceUSA, which provides what they claim is the world’s most comprehensive data on U.S. businesses and organizations (around 14 million).  Designed for commercial purposes, there are limitless possibilities for scholars interested in neighborhood conditions, spatial analysis, labor issues, and urban conditions more generally.  Their data are assembled from phone directories, county courthouses, public record notices, and others.  A team of 600 researchers works full time on maintaining and updating the database.  Check out their promotional video on data quality.  (The service also has personal residential data on 100 million U.S. households, the type of data used by telemarketers.   You can send them an email to remove your name.)  Urbanorgs researchers will want to know that the business data are very easy to download (in Excel, tab delmited, and other formats) and remarkably rich.  From their website: “The lists include business name and phone number, complete address, key executive name, SIC code, employee size, sales volume, business expenditures and much more.  In addition… geo-codes for mapping, fax and toll-free numbers, website address, franchise and brand information, headline news, liens, judgements and bankruptcies, email addresses, number of computers, work-at-home businesses, and business credit rating scores.”  Many libraries subscribe to the service. The more obscure data are not available for every organization, but what is available is impressive.  (Updated)