Daniel - August 9, 2021
In this article, I’ll be showing you how to scrape data from Google Maps, the most used mapping platform in the world.
Google Maps is a mapping and navigation platform from Google. The app is simply to help users find directions from one place to another. Google launched the Maps service in 2005 and it’s the most used mapping app in the world.
Google Maps has some very interesting features which a lot of other mapping applications do not have. This includes features like satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets, and real-time traffic conditions among others.
You can use Google Maps on a variety of devices and operating systems.
As you already know, Google is the number one website on the internet. Saying everyone makes use of Google is not an understatement. Businesses, houses, companies, schools, hospitals, etc are all listed on Google Maps. Google Maps identifies these places so travellers can easily find their directions.
What this means is that the Google Maps platform is a huge resource of leads for any type of business and industry. If you’re a company, for example, you can use data from Google Map to know which other similar companies are within your locality. You can also discover the companies that people visit the most and more.
Not to mention Google Maps also contain reviews and star ratings that can be highly useful. These can give you insights on which companies people are finding difficult to locate and how you can better arrange your directions to make it easier for potential customers.
What’s more? You can get phone numbers, emails, addresses, etc. All of these data are already present in the Google Maps platform. However, you can’t browse through every page to get them. That’ll be a heavy waste of time.
When you scrape the platform, all data you need will be extracted automatically. You can get it exported in a spreadsheet which is a lot easier to work with to find the information you need.
There are two things you need to scrape data from Google Maps; a good web scraping bot and a good proxy.
A web scraping bot is simply the program that will access Google Maps server files to extract the information you need. It includes a crawler and scraper. The crawler will crawl the database to find the data you need while the scraper does the extraction. The entire process is very fast.
You don’t need to build a web scraping bot yourself. There are several web scraping programs and web drivers you can just buy and use.
You will need a proxy to stay safe and secure. Scraping data from Google isn’t easy due to anti-spam detectors. Your bot can be detected as spam traffic which will get it blocked. To prevent this block, you need to make the traffic appear as organic or direct as possible.
This is achievable by rotating IP addresses. To rotate IPs, you need so many of them and you can get more than you’ll need, thousands and millions, from a proxy.
To scrape data from Google Maps without issues, you need a good proxy. ProxyRack is a recommended proxy service to make use of. The proxy service is one of the bests as you get secure and reliable proxies are relatively affordable prices. Check out the proxies below;
Residential Proxies
Unmetered Residential Proxies: Starting from $80
Premium GEO Residential Proxies: Starting from $14.95
Private Residential Proxies: Starting from $99.95
Datacenter Proxies
USA Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Mixed Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Shared Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $49
Canada Rotating Proxies: Starting at $65
Now you know how to scrape data from Google Maps.
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