Matching SafeGraph businesses to other business databases using name / address

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#1

Hi, we are matching SafeGraph businesses to other business databases using name / address in order to benchmark and obtain additional information about these businesses. The quality of the match depends crucially on standardizing name and address prior to matching. 3 questions:

(1) @ross_epstein_safegraph What is the source of Safegraph’s business name / address / lat-lon information? Has it been standardized in any way and if so how?

(2) We have been using Google places API to standardize name / addresses in our outside databases and to obtain lat-lon at the same time. But this is costly ($17 per 1000 API calls) given that we want to standarize millions of name / addresses. Can anyone with large Google API capacity help (or know someone at Google to ask for a “free pass” :slightly_smiling_face: )? Can SmartyStreet help (@Jeffrey_Duncan_SmartyStreets_LLC kindly offered such a service in March on this channel)? Many thanks!!

(3) Alternatives to standardizing name and addresses and then using a match algorithm (I know of a project that uses the bing.com web search API to obtain URLs of businesses and match in that way; but that also requires a paid subscription and not clear it’s better given that SafeGraph comes with lat-lon info)

Sorry for the long post and many thanks for your help!!

#2

@Andre_Kurmann_Drexel_University we have a free service called Match that will do this matching for you:

https://docs.safegraph.com/docs/matching-service-overview

highly recommend

Smarty streets can definitely help you standardize addresses at scale (which will increase your match rate in the SafeGraph matching service).

#3

Thanks @Ryan_Fox_Squire_SafeGraph. We’ve been using your match service and it’s quite useful. Unsurprisingly, some of the match results differ depending on whether we use raw business names / address (as users enter them into the database we want to match) or Google names / addresses (obtained by running raw names / addresses through Google API first). In addition, running Google API provides lat-lon which helps improving the match results.

#4

That’s why we’d like to run all of our database through Google Places API first (or another service) before matching with SG.

#5

Getting help from SmartyStreets on this would be fantastic. @Jeffrey_Duncan_SmartyStreets_LLC, please let us know if this is possible – many thanks!