Random Modern Business Names

I love random names. Especially the strange, odd, esoteric, cool stuff people come up with across the world. I’ve long wanted a business name database and I finally procured one. It is pretty massive at 21 million entries for the U.S. I’m pretty certain there is not 1 business per 15 residents, which lead to the original data conversion.

However, many of the entries are not useful for my context. They did not contain a NAICS or SIC code that usefully designated the business. Not to mention that many entries are duplicated. Plus the expected duplication of names across the nation. After trimming, taming and normal data tweaks, I ended up with about 5.5 million entries. I retained the duplicate entries across states because I may want state specific names at some point.

Presenting the information is a challenge. If it is too fine, selecting between categories is a nuisance. The general industry classification breaks out 700 odd entries. Moving it up one level in the NAICS standard still results in 99 categories. For some purposes, 99 is better but fails with specific desires. Scrolling through 700 entries isn’t happening with the 3 second attention span of most web users.

So I’ll start with 99: Modern Business Names. It is somewhat useful. The data needs additional cleanup and frankly 99 categories is far too many. In the months to come, I may split out what I believe are interesting industries into individual generators. I have a few in mind.

If there is a particular industry that would be useful, let me know. Or if you want to drill down into 700 different categories, I’m open to that as well. Until that happens, coarse will work.

Random Bank Names

What was once a habit of trolling for new ideas has slacked off of late. I blame summer for heat and distractions. Tonight, I overcame my typical summer lethargy to roll out a new generator: Bank and Financial Names.

The current database consists of a mere 14,000 entries. If it proves useful to others, I can easily expand by substituting city names with other results from the City Name generator. Country and country names are also plausible although I removed most of those from the default output.

In other news, I’m looking at a new hosting provider. Almost half the time I try to upload new content to the current host, it fails. Tired of dealing with their half-assed solution to the actual problem.

Adding a bit of Geographic Diversity to the Restaurant Name Generator

Added in some establishments from Chicago, Denver, Larimer County Colorado, Portland and El Paso. Unique name count is now up to nearly 70000 entries. I still need to purge the DB of what I find less than useful but its far better than what it once was.

Time to Eat: Random Restaurant Names

I’ve been trolling around for real business names for some time. Databases of actual business are available at crazy prices but I do one level for this hobby — zero cost. Thanks to data.gov I stumbled across a list of NY establishments — those inspected by the state. The data was a mess. Upper and lower case words, oddball combinations of words, strange abbreviations, and other curious combinations so I spent a fair amount of time cleaning it up. I also stripped out nearly 15000 entries related to schools or repetitious entries. More time at fixing the data could be spent but I wanted to roll out the full system before tweaking and tuning even further.

The resulting generator is the Random Restaurant/Eatery Generator.

I’d really like to merge some of the results with the Street Name and City Name Generators to expand the field exponentially. Until then, it will remain a whole lot of NY style names (both state and city). I like it thus far even if the data cleanup is incomplete.