Google Maps Places Scraper

Google Maps Places Scraper A powerful Apify Actor built with Scrapy and Playwright to scrape detailed information about places from Google Maps. Perfect for gathering business data, competitor research, lead generation, and local market analysis. ## Features - 🗺️ Comprehensive Data Extraction - Scrapes 13+ data points per place including name, rating, reviews, address, phone, website, hours, and more - 🎯 Flexible Search - Search for any type of business or point of interest in any city - 🔄 Automatic Scrolling - Intelligently scrolls through Google Maps results to load more places - 🚀 Playwright Integration - Uses browser automation for reliable scraping of dynamic content - 📊 Structured Output - Returns clean, validated JSON data ready for analysis - 🛡️ Proxy Support - Optional proxy configuration to avoid rate limiting - ⚡ Concurrent Processing - Efficiently scrapes multiple places in parallel ## Included Technologies - Apify SDK for Python - a toolkit for building Apify Actors and scrapers in Python - Scrapy - a fast high-level web scraping framework for crawling and data extraction - Playwright - browser automation library for handling JavaScript-heavy sites - scrapy-playwright - Scrapy integration with Playwright - Input schema - define and validate Actor input parameters - Dataset - store structured data in a scalable format ## How it works This Actor uses Scrapy with Playwright to scrape Google Maps places in two phases: 1. Search Phase: - Constructs a Google Maps search URL based on your interest and city - Loads the search results page using Playwright (for JavaScript rendering) - Automatically scrolls through results to load more places - Collects all place URLs from the search results 2. Detail Extraction Phase: - Visits each place URL individually - Extracts comprehensive information using CSS selectors - Cleans and validates the data through processing pipelines - Saves structured data to the Apify dataset Data Processing: - Rating and review counts are parsed from text to numbers - Phone numbers and addresses are trimmed of extra whitespace - Google redirect URLs are converted to actual website URLs - Missing or unavailable fields are set to null for consistency ## Input Parameters | Parameter | Type | Required | Description | |-----------|------|----------|-------------| | interest | String | Yes | Type of place to search for (e.g., "cafes", "restaurants", "hotels", "gyms") | | city | String | Yes | City name to search in (e.g., "New York", "London", "Tokyo") | | maxResults | Integer | No | Maximum number of places to scrape (0 = unlimited, default: 50) | | proxyConfiguration | Object | No | Proxy settings to avoid rate limiting (recommended for large scrapes) | ## Output Data Each scraped place contains the following fields: json { "url": "https://www.google.com/maps/place/...", "search_query": "cafes in New York", "city": "New York", "interest": "cafes", "name": "Joe's Coffee Shop", "rating": 4.5, "reviews": 1234, "category": "Coffee shop", "address": "123 Main St, New York, NY 10001", "phone": "(212) 555-0123", "website": "https://joescoffee.com", "hours": "Open ⋅ Closes 8 PM", "plus_code": "P27Q+3V New York" } ## Use Cases - 📍 Lead Generation - Find potential customers in specific industries and locations - 🏢 Competitor Research - Analyze competitor locations, ratings, and customer reviews - 📊 Market Analysis - Understand business density and distribution in different areas - 📞 Contact Lists - Build databases of business contacts for outreach - ⭐ Review Analysis - Gather review counts and ratings for market research - 🗺️ Location Intelligence - Map out business ecosystems in target cities ## Resources - Google Maps Scraping Guide - Web scraping with Scrapy - Python tutorials in Academy - Playwright for Web Scraping - Integration with Zapier, Make, Google Drive, and others - Video guide on getting scraped data using Apify API ## Getting started For complete information see this article. In short, you will: 1. Build the Actor 2. Run the Actor ## Pull the Actor for local development If you would like to develop locally, you can pull the existing Actor from Apify console using Apify CLI: 1. Install apify-cli Using Homebrew bash brew install apify-cli Using NPM bash npm -g install apify-cli 2. Pull the Actor by its unique <ActorId>, which is one of the following: - unique name of the Actor to pull (e.g. "apify/hello-world") - or ID of the Actor to pull (e.g. "E2jjCZBezvAZnX8Rb") You can find both by clicking on the Actor title at the top of the page, which will open a modal containing both Actor unique name and Actor ID. This command will copy the Actor into the current directory on your local machine. bash apify pull <ActorId> ## Documentation reference To learn more about Apify and Actors, take a look at the following resources: - Apify SDK for JavaScript documentation - Apify SDK for Python documentation - Apify Platform documentation - Join our developer community on Discord