Scraping Google maps is a quite lot of work. It is hectic I know. But I have figured out a solution for that. In this article, we will be scraping the local business data from google maps with our favorite scraping framework puppeteer. To know more about puppeteers you can check <a href="https://scraperspace.blogue.tech/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">scraperspace</a>. So let's get started scraping google maps. <h2>Installation</h2>You need to install puppeteer and nodejs in your system. You can install a puppeteer with the below command. <pre class="ql-syntax" spellcheck="false">npm install -g puppeteer 
</pre> After installation is done. <ul><li> Search for google maps </li><li>type business in the search box</li><li>copy the URL from the browsers search bar</li></ul> Let's write the function to parse the maps data: <pre class="ql-syntax" spellcheck="false">const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

async function autoScroll(page) {
await page.evaluate(async () =&gt; {
await new Promise((resolve, reject) =&gt; {
var totalHeight = 0;
var distance = 300;
var timer = setInterval(() =&gt; {
const element = document.querySelectorAll('.section-scrollbox')[1];
var scrollHeight = element.scrollHeight;
element.scrollBy(0, distance);
totalHeight += distance;
if (totalHeight &gt;= scrollHeight) {
clearInterval(timer);
resolve();
}
}, 100);
});
});
}

async function parsePlaces(page) {

let places = [];
const elements = await page.$$('.gm2-subtitle-alt-1 span');
if (elements &amp;&amp; elements.length) {

for (const el of elements) {

const name = await el.evaluate(span =&gt; span.textContent);
places.push({ name });
}
}
return places;
}
</pre>The code above will auto-scroll and parse the business places. If there are multiple pages we need to look into those pages as well so let's do that. <pre class="ql-syntax" spellcheck="false">async function goToNextPage(page) {
await page.click('button[aria-label=" Next page "]');
await page.waitForNetworkIdle();
}

async function hasNextPage(page) {
const element = await page.$('button[aria-label=" Next page "]');
if (!element) {
throw new Error('Next page element is not found');
}
const disabled = await page.evaluate((el) =&gt; el.getAttribute('disabled'), element);

if (disabled) {
console.log('The next page button is disabled');
}
return !disabled;
}
</pre>So if there is a next page button then the script will look into it a well. Now Finalising the code into the main function.<pre class="ql-syntax" spellcheck="false">

(async () =&gt; {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: false });
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.setViewport({
width: 1300,
height: 900
});

await page.goto('PASTE THE LINK HERE);

let places = [];
do {
await autoScroll(page);
places = places.concat(await parsePlaces(page));
console.log('Parsed ' + places.length + ' places');
await goToNextPage(page);
} while (await hasNextPage(page))

console.log(places);
})();
</pre> That's it. Now you will get all the places in your console. Happy Coding ...

Scrape local business from google maps with Puppeteer

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