Get Coordinates for Any Location
The Google Maps Search API has a secret feature, where Google will return the coordinates and bounding box if you enter in a city name as the query. This is very useful as to use the Google Maps API (and many other APIs that work with locations and coordinate), you’ll need to provide a latitude and longitude.
While you can easily get the coordinates by using a search engine (just type in the city name plus “coordinates” into your favorite search engine), if you have a large list of cities you want to scrape data from, you’ll want a more automated way to look up coordinates based on city names. We offer a workflow to help with this, where you can provide a list of cities (or search terms), and we will process the list and return a CSV file with the combined coordinates.
The Google Maps API will also return a “bounding box” of 2 coordinates (one northeast and the other southwest) to form a “bounding box” around the main area of the city. This is very helpful as some larger cities will have a larger bounding box, so you’ll want to know this information if you want to ensure you scrape as many businesses as possible.