Where the data comes from and how often it refreshes

FindAndClose is a warehouse that a crawler keeps fresh, not a scraper that runs when you press search. That one architectural fact explains most of what follows.

The sources

• Google Maps — 248M+ businesses
• Apple Maps — 185M+ businesses
• Bing Maps — 142M+ businesses
• The businesses' own websites, for email addresses and social links
• The social profiles those websites link to

Every row carries its own provenance: the Google ID it is keyed on, a Link straight to the public listing it was read from, and First seen on, the date the business entered our index. Those fields are not decorative — see the 64 columns. Addresses found on a business's own website carry their own per-address sources list as well, inside the All emails column.

Deduplication across the three maps

The same business usually appears on all three. We match them and keep one row, using the stable Google feature id (the Google ID column) as the primary key where one exists. You are not billed three times for one dentist, and you do not get three near-identical rows to clean up. Where the sources disagree on a field, the more recently scraped value wins.

How often a record is refreshed

Re-crawl frequency is weighted by category volatility. Restaurants, salons and retail, where a large share of listings change in a year, come round far more often than notaries or funeral directors. A country-wide sweep of a volatile category is a different job from a sweep of a stable one, and they run on different clocks.

Why nothing is scraped while you wait

A search is a query against the warehouse. That is why a city-sized search returns in about a second, why previewing is free, and why we can afford to let you refine a search twenty times. It is also why coverage is a property of the index rather than of your query: if a business is not in the index, no amount of searching will conjure it.

Coverage is uneven, and that is honest

Every market we index is searchable on every plan, including the trial. Depth varies with how well mapped a market is: western Europe, North America, Australia and Japan are dense; coverage thins where fewer businesses maintain a map listing at all. The count shown before you export is the real number in the index, not a projection of the market.

Closed businesses

They stay in the index with Is closed permanently set to Yes, and are excluded from exports by default. You can opt them back in — competitive analysis and churn research both need them — but you will never be silently billed for a business that shut last year.

Checking a row yourself

Every row carries Link. Open it and you are looking at the live listing. If it disagrees with the export, that is worth telling us — reporting a wrong record.