Many users want data from google places to be extracted by scraping Intelligence crawler. When we first started working on a project like this in past, we always recommended that the user should try and use Google Places API. However, the majority of users stated that they require information which API does not supply. As a result, we decided to develop a general solution.
The general solution found to this problem is Actor that extracts data from google maps. The actor uses Google Maps to enter a search query and then goes through each result. For a single location, the output detail contains:
By using the Google Places API, you can retrieve just 6 user ratings, 12 photographs of the location, popular time’s histogram is not included in the data. Hiring an actor assist you in retrieving all the user ratings, all the photographs of the location and popular times histogram.
The best part about Scraping Intelligence is that it provides you with the complete information as per the requirement by an actor. Let us start by visiting the actor library page and click on the button try actor. If you already have an account log-in to the page and if not, then create an account using Gmail. The actor will take you to the console page and run the request. The actor also allows you to choose the location of the data needed.
For example, search is used to specify the search string with which you wish to search for places, such as restaurants. You can use any proxy IPs you wish for the crawler in the Proxy settings. We will use Scraping intelligence proxy for the example because this option is for advanced users.
By using Viewport point latitude, longitude, and zoom level to find places in a certain location. For example, you might want to find places like restaurants in United States. First determine the latitude and longitude values by using converter of United States. Put these latitude and longitude values into the configuration. The zoom level of the viewport is all set for using the viewport zoom level value, it is a value between 1 and 20, with 20 indicating the map viewport is fully zoomed in. Now combining the zoom level with longitude and latitude values the viewport shows whole data of the location i.e., United States. Google Maps also provides the specific viewport for specific location.
The last configuration option is MAX crawled Places which is used to limit the results that is to be obtained. You can select the limitation may be to show 50 or 60 or 100 locations out of available places.
Run button to be used in the configuration. You will find the data in a dataset after some time.
The seamless format for an actor is JSON but the results contain some nested Arrays and table format is unreadable in it. So to make it readable some other famous formats are used like CSV, HTML, and EXCEL.
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