Google Places Free Text Scraping
The simplest way to scrape Google Maps via the official API is through the new Places Text Search endpoint, which allows you to enter a free text search query like “Italian Restaurant in New York” without needing to specify coordinates.
You can also specify exactly which fields you’d like returned from the API, so if you need to scrape phone numbers and business websites in addition to basic information like address, you can specify the API return those fields as well.
The API supports pagination and will return up to 60 total results (over 3 pages) per search query. If you need to scrape more results than this, you can try searching with multiple queries, since the 60 limit is per query. E.g. you can try searching for different neighborhoods in your search query, type of restaurant, etc…
Location Bias Coordinates
If you’re a more advanced user and would like to provide a location bias for scraping, you can supply one in the form of a latitude and longitude coordinate pair. If doing to, we suggest to not specify the location in the free text query and instead just query for the type of business you’re looking to scrape.
While this approach requires looking up coordinates, it does allow you to perform a deep crawl, as you can run multiple searches for each coordinate pair and get 60 results back. So you can use the same free text query and provide a grid of coordinates instead to get the results back when performing a deep crawl.