Search Pennsylvania Registered Business Entities

Purpose

Search and return Pennsylvania registered business entities from the official Commonwealth open-data catalog, using the distinct-business view and its Socrata API endpoint.

When to Use

Use when the caller needs to find registered Pennsylvania businesses by a name, keyword, or other full-text business-entity term. Use the current-by-county dataset instead when county-level registration records rather than distinct entities are required.

Workflow

1. Construct the single-navigation Socrata API URL, URL-encoding the caller's search text: https://data.pa.gov/resource/3urc-uaba.json?$q={encoded-query}&$limit={limit}. Use a practical default such as 100; omit $q for an unfiltered browse.
2. goto that URL with waitUntil: domcontentloaded, then run the following evaluator on the loaded API response:

(() => {
  const text = document.body?.innerText?.trim() || "";
  let payload;
  try {
    payload = JSON.parse(text);
  } catch (_) {
    return { rows: [], error: "Expected a Socrata JSON response" };
  }
  const rows = Array.isArray(payload)
    ? payload
    : Array.isArray(payload.data)
      ? payload.data
      : [];
  return { rows, count: rows.length };
})();

3. Preserve the returned row objects as-is; field names are dataset-defined and should be inspected from the response rather than guessed. The human-facing distinct-business view is https://data.pa.gov/Licenses-Certificates/Filtered-View-Distinct-Registered-Businesses-in-PA/3urc-uaba/about_data.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• This is a Socrata catalog: the opaque resource ID 3urc-uaba is the direct API key for the distinct registered-business view; do not rely on the long display title.
• The related source dataset for current records by county/department is xvd7-5r2c, available at https://data.pa.gov/resource/xvd7-5r2c.json and https://data.pa.gov/Licenses-Certificates/Registered-Businesses-in-PA-Current-by-County-Depa/xvd7-5r2c.
• $q performs Socrata full-text matching across the view. For exact field filtering, first inspect returned keys or the dataset metadata rather than assuming a column name.
• Keep $limit explicit because the API response is paginated by request size; issue additional requests with $offset={n} when the caller needs more than one page.
• The API response is JSON rendered in the browser document, so parse document.body.innerText; do not use an LLM page scraper for structured extraction.

Expected Output

An object of the form { rows: [...], count: number }, where each row is one JSON business-entity record returned by the distinct registered-business view.