Steps I took to grab and filter a large list of companies for potentially cold calling.
Step 1: Google list of companies in your area
This ^^^^^^^^ is an example of a site I quickly found using google.
It's definately a long list of about 50-60 which has descriptions, logos, etc. Which is great for the site and looks nice, but is horrible for compiling a list across multiple sites without having to type out(copy and paste) each and every one. And just copy-pasting the full page is going to give you a bunch of extra words you don't want.
Step 2: Find the info you do want
Here we are going to right click on the title and inspect to grab the class name(also double check if this is unique, most websites i've seen will keep titles as it's own class)
clicking inspect will bring up the console at points us to the "thing" we right clicked on. In this case it's the title that we want and right above that is the class(do this for a couple more titles to make sure we have the right class and copy/paste the class in a notepad or something).
In this case the class is "has-huge-font-size".
next we scroll to the bottom of the page of the left to make sure every title is loaded on the page to the left (the page only fetches the rest of the companies when they are needed so the initial page loads faster, but we want to grab all of them).
Get the class we copied earlier and paste it into the appropriate places in our for loop.
let l = document.getElementsByClassName('?????').length;
for (let i = 0; i < l; i++) {
console.log(document.getElementsByClassName('?????')[i].innerText)
}
paste it where the questions marks currently reside.
innerText may also need to be changed depending on what the "thing" you want to grab is called.
This For loop grabbed all the titles on the page and now allows us to copy and paste all of the titles at once into a word/notepad document of some kind.(in this case i also had to ctrl+f find and removeAll "VM686:3" in order to keep just the titles but that didn't take longer than 30 seconds in google docs)
At this point you can repeat the steps above and grab the lists of companies from a bunch of different websites.
Once you've gone through 5 or so websites and compiled a lot of companies into a document you can now copy+paste the list into an excel document(current example being google sheets)
within Google Sheets/Excel I opened the format tab and clicked on conditional formatting(this part is for getting rid of the duplicates)
Partial Duplicate Formula/Code =if(A1<>"",Countif(A$1:A,left(A1,10)& "*") > 1)
Delete the highlighted duplicates and you are good to go :)