Google Maps Scraping Demo - How to scrape Google Maps like a pro

This is a recording of our live Q&A webinar and demo on how to scrape Google Maps like a pro!

In this session, Lukas Krivka, our biggest internal expert on Google Maps scraping first discusses the limitations of the official Google Maps API, then introduces and demos our Google Maps Scraper, and then answers many questions we got from the audience about scraping Google Maps.

Whether you're a beginner or have some prior experience, this session is designed to equip you with the tips & tricks needed to master Google Maps scraping.

*🧑‍💻 Resources mentioned throughout the Google Maps Scraping Demo:*
🔧 Build your own scrapers:

*In this video, you can find ⌛️*
0:00 Introduction
1:42 Why was there a need for a Google Maps Scraper?
3:03 Demonstration
8:47 Q&A:
9:00 Can I scrape all traffic road closures/segments in the US?
9:53 Can I scrape all Burger King restaurants in GA with a Permanently Closed or Temporarily Closed Status?
10:55 Can I scrape a whole country?
11:57 Can I scrape by ZIP codes?
13:19 Can I scrape all places there are in some location, without specifying what the places should be?
15:50 Is there a way to get more contact information than there is on Google Maps, like the Facebook or Instagram page of the place?
17:39 I want to scrape mainly reviews from Google Maps. Is there a way to run them through some kind of analyzer tool on Apify as well?
19:40 Is it possible to customize the existing Google Maps Scraper to optimize it for our use case (we want to scrape some extra stuff)?
20:40 How can I scrape traffic data from Google Maps?
22:15 Many Google Maps Actors in Store seem to be from some mysterious user “Compass”, but they don’t have any info on their profile. Are they trustworthy?
23:12 Is there a way to get more specific data? when I put in a category like “hospital” I get a lot of non-hospitals in the data that I have to manually delete.
24:14 I want to scrape: name, address, phone, email, fax, website URL, main image URL, categories, how many, how many reviews…
25:10 Is there a way to find out the Google Maps category structure beforehand to be able to set a more relevant search term?
26:20 How to scrape review performance data on all locations i.e {locationId}) registered to an account ie.{accountId})… And pull all related review content?
27:04 What languages are supported?
27:51 When you set a rather precise search term as Hotel, you get a lot of companies/results that don't match. Can you avoid that in any way?
28:20 Are there ways to only target certain categories of businesses in the scrape?
28:46 Can you merge two Actors like Google Maps Scraper and Facebook Events Scraper?
29:50 Can you elaborate on the difference between placeId (pid), customerId (cid), and featureId (ftid)? What would be best for my database to use as a main id?
31:06 I ran that scraper a couple of weeks ago and I got 150 datasets after killing the process manually. Is there any time limit you can set for output vs time running?
31:55 Are search terms ANDed or ORed?
32:46 Can we use the operators like quotes and minus in Apify (like in Google Search) for better searching?
33:33 Is there a way to get all info from a list of predefined places? this would periodically download and detect changes/trends for each place
34:55 Can you scrape road closures?
35:35 Still confused about scraping reviews – the demo-ed actor is free and seems to support scraping also reviews. What is the benefit of paid Reviews Scraper?
36:45 Is it possible to get the emails from the website? Or from the map’s data?
37:53 How to avoid duplicates, when you try to scrape the hotels for a city?
38:43 If I know fundamentals in Python, can I create my own actor?
39:58 Conclusion

#googlemaps #webscraping

[Apify]

Resources mentioned throughout the Google Maps Scraping Demo:
- Build your own scrapers:

[Peter-lfci]

Hi, can you elaborate on how you calculate review PublishedAtDate? As I understand there's only relative time (3 months ago, a year ago, etc.) that we can scrape from Google Maps. How do you extract so precise dates? Or do Google allow to scrape an exact date instead of relative time?

[filipefalcao]

Is possible to scrape a define custom area?

[websurferwizard]

Can you do all of USA or do you have to go city by city?

[ilyasamify]

is it legal to scrape google Maps in the EU?