I thought you'd never ask (grin!)Does anyone have anything to add to this topic?
Some four years ago I was approached by a rat who wanted to know if one could obtain the contact details for an AirBNB by using Google. Since 1993 my philosophy has been "The answer is always YES",
Yours is a search, using a general search engine/browser etc so this technique ought to apply to your search.
This is a generalized approach to internet searching; in past years I used a similar scheme to assemble a contact list of Businesses given a postal code. In Canada a postal code is seven characters: <letter><digit><letter><space><digit><letter><digit>.
"Regal Forklift Training School" is at "5511 Tomken Rd Unit 8, Mississauga, ON L4W 3Y3", but I would load contact details for all businesses at any level of the postcode. "L" would get you all the suburbs of the "Greater Toronto Area", but "L4" would narrow down results, "L4Y" narrower, and "L4Y 3Y3" would get you (usually) a single block of a street.
Back to AirBNB and generalized searching of the internet. This process if done manually, will succeed, but will take weeks to do; computerized it will finish in 30 minutes, so a specific town could be updated once a day and stay current.
A search OF the AirBNB site for Bonavista will return many pages of hits.
For each hit, confirm that the word "Bonavista" occurs in that web page, and if you want to, check that the postal code "A0C 1B0" appears in that page, then issue another search for that AirBNB name and the city "Bonavista".
You will receive, say, 25 hits, each one with something to say about "Seaside Cottage"
Examine each of those 25 pages for "Seaside Cottage", locate every ten-digit string in that page and record the tally of each phone number. The most common telephone number will likely be that of the contact for "Seaside Cottage"
Institute another search for that "Seaside Cottage" and the city "Bonavista", AND the most common telephone number.
You will receive another 25 hits, each one having a little more detail, for you have barred those hits that do not have the "best" telephone number.
Examine each of those 25 pages for email addresses, in that page and record the tally of each email address. The most common email address will likely be that of the contact for "Seaside Cottage"
Repeat this drilling as deep as you like. I have VBA code that can detect street addresses, personal names, titles ("owner", "caretaker" etc.), and in the end you will have a set of contact data that can be assigned a degree of accuracy/certainty. Feed that data to your band of commission-hungry sneaky sales clerks.
If you are embarking in a serious search for data about each MP3 audio track in your system, a similar set of procedures could be used.
I wrote a heuristic cataloguer that could be turned loose on my 20,000 tracks and update an MSAccess data base using a few small tables of Composers, Artists, Key, performers etc and where it recognized a table datum in the FullName, assigned that datum as a recognized component. The data record thrown up to the user was populated with known data. The user filled in those fields that could be filled, and new data could be added to the tables, making the program "smarter" for the next audio track. It was in effect a well-trained clerk.
This is way off-track for Everything.
I used the WiseOwl video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7yWL0oCB3k to get started.
Cheers, Chris
Statistics: Posted by ChrisGreaves — Fri Oct 24, 2025 8:28 pm
