Creating Leads From The Internet

 

About a decade ago I wrote a page, Finding Seniors On The Internet, about how you could use the Whitepages API to find the names and phone numbers of people over the age of 65. A nice feature of the search I described is that it finds those seniors in a given area code; perfect for telemarketing. Besides calling these people, you might want to e-mail them ,too. Once again, you will be e-mailing people in a given area code; perfect for mass mailings.

 

The Algorithm

(1) java WPAPISearch AreaCode Exchange LineNumber // creates XML files for each phone number that has a person's name associated with it
     a. AreaCode: an integer value for the area code; e.g., 954
     b. Exchange: an integer value for the exchange (used to correspond to a trunk number); e.g., 970
     c. LineNumber: an integer value for the last 4 digits of a phone number

(2) java GetEmailAddresses searchSite //produces files with people names; e-mail addresses inside
                                                                   //searchSite is the website you want to start the search with

 

WPAPISearch calls the Whitepages API for a reverse lookup of the phone number you entered in the command line. It then subtracts one from the LineNumber and makes a reverse number lookup for the new number, ..., until we are down to a LineNumber of 0099. The WhitePages API creates an XML page with all of the info about the person associated with the phone number; their name, address, etc.  To make the processing easier for step (2) I also create an output file called people.txt, which contains a list of all the people it found

GetEmailAddresses calls a web crawling program; SearchCrawler. I copied SeachCrawler.java from the Internet. I just searched on Bing for SearchCrawler.java and came up with http://www.java-tips.org/java-se-tips/javax.swing/how-to-create-a-search-crawler-in-java-3.html   It looks like there are a lot of other web pages with this program on it, too. I did some serious modifications to this program (great software isn't written, it's re-written) so that it now produces as output, text files that are named the same as your search term, and those files are filled with the e-mail addresses of the pages it found with the search word in them. The call to SearchCrawler is java SearchCrawler Name searchSite. Name is a record from people.txt, and is also the name of somebody who associated with a phone number that was searched in step (1). I put a limit to the number of web sites searched to 10,000 but the program will exit after it's found 10 e-mail addresses or it has found one or more addresses and has crawled at least 100 pages.

SearchCrawler can also be called from the command line, and has an extra (optional) parameter you can use:
java SearchCrawler Name searchSite limit   where limit is the literal string, "limit". This limits your crawling to the original searchSite.  Say you are searching for the string "programmer" on some job board, too find a programming job. You don't want to leave the job board because it might put you on some web page with the string "programmer" on it and the e-mail address belongs to the page owner, Bob who happens to be a programmer. By limiting yourself to the job board you'd only get the e-mail addresses of people who want to hire programmers.

 

Blog Part
(Note to the impatient: There are links to the programs at the bottom of this page)

I put this blog/program page up last night, but never really explained the reason why it should be a blog, too. At the beginning of the 21st century the MSM was telling the public at large that programming jobs were drying up in the United States like buggy whip jobs were at the start of the 20th century. This meant that programming had become an obsolete profession! Of course those jobs were getting shipped out of the country to third world countries that still needed them (these are the countries that have strong economies today; e.g., India, China, etc.), and those countries still have them. E.g., back in 2001 the C programming language was the 7th most in demand IT skill in the USA; in 2002 it wasn't even in the top 25. If you search for C programming jobs in the USA today you'll find very few, but there are still plenty of those jobs in other countries.

If you were a programmer back in the 90s, making a great living, and you want to use those programming skills today as a way to supplement your income as a janitor (or whatever it is you do today) then you could create a marketing campaign and make a living as a salesman; create an e-commerce web site, create marketing leads, create an e-mail marketing campaign, etc. In fact, about 8 years ago I was going to start an e-mail campaign for a mortgage company, and called up the city to see if they sold lists of home owners; they did (and do). However, I was told it would be unethical for the city to include e-mail addresses in the list, but for a nominal charge the city would e-mail these people for me!

Notice how you start getting pop-up adds for items you just searched for on the Internet? You're getting spammed by the owner of the search engine you used. Your ISP probably has agreements with different search engines and other Internet services; they spam you, too and get paid by these search engine companies. Yet that same ISP is probably blocking port 25 on your computer, preventing you from starting an e-mail server; they want to make sure if you send out e-mail, they will know about it.

You might be thinking that's OK. If you are getting spammed by "legitimate sources" you don't need the addition of freelancers spamming you. Those freelancers probably got their jobs pulled out from under their feet by big business. Big business is now trying to make sure those hackers (a hacker is an out of work programmer) don't take any of big business's profits. Would you rather big business make 100% of the money to be had from Internet advertising, then sharing it with the people they stabbed in the back at the beginning of this century?

Download The Programs Here

ReadMe.txt    WPAPISearch.java   GetEmailAddresses.java    SearchCrawler.java

You'll have too edit WPAPISearch and replace the key with a value you get by registering with the Whitepages; http://developer.whitepages.com/

 

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