The Google search engine is a unique search engine with billions of searches per day. One of the most important factors in Google’s appeal to people from all over the world is the platforms it provides like Google Trends, Google News, and Google Maps. In particular, Google Maps is available on almost every mobile phone lately, providing an excellent service for creating routes and discovering new places. The data provided by Google Maps, whose usage rate is increasing day by day, is of critical importance for many businesses that want to make a difference in the digital age. Many Google SERP APIs have been developed to scrape Google Maps data for these businesses.
Google Maps provides users with a range of functions, such as discovering places around the world, getting directions, checking traffic information, locating businesses, and searching for nearby restaurants, hotels, and other points of interest. In addition, Google Maps has a social component that allows users to interact with and share reviews, ratings, and photos about places. With all these aspects, it contains unique data for businesses that want to stand out. In this article, we will talk about the use cases of Google Maps data. Then, we will introduce the best Google Maps scraper API that can scrape Google Maps data just in seconds. Lastly, we will integrate this API to Node.js and scrape data from Google Maps step by step.
Table of Contents
What are the Use Cases of Scraping Google Maps Data?
There are several popular uses for scraping Google Maps data:
- Business Analysis: By scraping business data from Google Maps, you can get a list of businesses in a particular area and their addresses. You can also extract data about ratings, reviews, and other user feedback from businesses on Google Maps. This data can help business owners analyze their competitors, evaluate customer satisfaction and improve their marketing strategies.
- Location-Based Services: By scraping Google Maps data, you can get a list of points of interest such as restaurants, hotels, shopping malls, parks, and museums located in a particular location. This can be a great way to offer a location-based service to users. For example, you can develop a mobile application that shows users the museums or cinemas in the area.
- Market Research: Scraping data from Google Maps can be useful in market research. For example, to understand the distribution or competitive situation of a particular product or service in a particular region, you may want to extract the businesses and their locations in that region.
The Supreme Google Maps Scraper API: Zenserp API
Zenserp is the best web scraping API today, specializing in SERP. It can extract SERP data from almost any platform owned by Google.
This API extracts Google Maps data with a faster and seamless connection than other APIs on the market. This is why it is known as the most popular Google Maps API on the internet. Thanks to its strong infrastructure, it offers maximum speed to its users. It provides Google Maps data as a structured JSON object. Also, the data it provides includes unique fields such as address, coordinates, stars, and type.
Take a look at the differences between Zenserp and Yandex for reverse image search!
Zenserp API has unique documentation. This documentation contains detailed information about all endpoints of Zenserp and code examples for different programming languages.
How to Scrape Google Maps Data with Node.js?
In this part, we will develop a Node.js application where we will scrape data from Google Maps. We will scrape Google Maps data with Zenserp API. In this application, we will get the keyword to be searched from the client with an endpoint and we will scrape the results.
Get an API key from Zenserp API
Firstly, we need to have an API key in order to use the Zenserp API. Let’s register one of the subscription plans that Zenserp API offers us. After registration, we will see our API key and API usage on the ‘Dashboard’ page.
Create Node.js Project
Then we will create our Node.js project. For this, let’s open a terminal in the file path where we aim to develop the application. Then let’s run the following command and proceed with the default settings.
npm initThen, let’s create a file named ‘index.js’ in the file path where we created the application.
Install Required Libraries
Now let’s download and install the necessary libraries that we will use in our application. We will use ‘Express’ and ‘Cross Fetch’ libraries in our application. To download and install them in the Node.js application, it is sufficient to run the following command in a terminal in the file path where the application is located.
npm i express cross-fetchCode
Now we are ready to develop our application. Let’s open the ‘index.js’ file in a code editor and put the following codes inside.
const express = require('express');
const fetch = require('cross-fetch');
const app = express();
const port = 3000;
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
const query = req.query.q; // 'q' parametresini al
const url = `https://app.zenserp.com/api/v2/search?apikey=YOUR-ACCESS-KEY&q=${query}&tbm=lcl&gl=TR`;
fetch(url)
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => {
const results = data.maps_results.slice(0, 5).map(result => {
return {
title: result.title,
address: result.address,
stars: result.stars
};
});
res.json(results);
})
.catch(error => {
console.log('Error:', error);
res.status(500).send('An error occurred');
});
});
app.listen(port, () => {
console.log(`Server is listening on port ${port}`);
});With this code, we get a keyword from the client to search Google Maps with an endpoint that we created. Then we dynamically send this keyword and statically the country parameter to the Google Maps endpoint of the Zenserp API. We set the country field to Italy as static. Finally, we send the ‘title’, ‘address’, and ‘stars’ information of the first five of the scraped data from the Zenserp API to the client as a response.
Before running the application, let’s put our own API key in the ‘YOUR-ACCESS-KEY’ field and run the application with the following command.
node index.jsTest
After running the application, let’s put the following URL in the URL of any browser.
http://localhost:3000/?q=Coffee HouseWhen we make a request to this URL, the JSON result we get will be as follows.
Conclusion
To summarise the above, Google Maps data is preferred for many use cases in many different industries. Many businesses use the Google Maps scraper APIs to get this data in the fastest and least costly way. These APIs are usually immediately integrated into many programming languages and give users high-speed scraping of Google Maps data.
Join the fastest and most reliable Google Maps API of 2023!
FAQs
Q: What are the Most Preferred Google Maps APIs to Scrape Google Maps?
A: Among the most preferred Google Maps APIs for scraping Google Maps are APIs such as Zenserp API, SerpApi, and Octoparse. These APIs provide users with data scraping capabilities from Google Maps, enabling them to extract business information, locations, star ratings, and other relevant data.
Q: What Does Zenserp Offer Besides the Google Maps Scraper Service?
A: Zenserp not only provides Google Maps scraper service. It provides data scraping capabilities from multiple search engines (like Google, Bing, and Yahoo). Zenserp API is a web service that specializes in SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) results. Users can get the data they want as extracted data by sending requests to Zenserp API with HTTP requests.
Q: Is Zenserp a Free Google Maps Data Scraper API?
A: Yes, it is. It offers developers a free subscription plan that can use up to 50 API calls per month.
Q: What are the Common Use Cases of Scraping Google Maps Data?
A: Google Maps data is preferred for many use cases in many domains. The most popular of them are as follows:
- Business Analysis
- The market research
- Competition Tracking
