10 guides
Every business in an area, not the first two hundred
Getting past Google Maps' ~200-result ceiling by tiling the map instead of paginating it: how a census plans a run before it costs anything, and why coverage is a property of the market rather than of the tool.
Scrape Google Maps
A walkthrough of the two-pass approach: classify the area first so you know what it costs, then extract only the tiles that need it.
The 200-result cap
The cap is per query, not per page, so the answer is geographic rather than paginated. What saturation means, why the threshold is 190, and how deep the splitting goes.
The census pass
The first pass extracts no businesses at all. It tells you which parts of an area are dense, which belong to a neighbouring country and which are empty — before you spend anything.
Coverage is the market
Phone, hours, rating and website vary enormously by city and by vertical. Two independent samples, 16,725 businesses, and why an average would be the wrong thing to publish.
The email question
Tools advertising emails with Google Maps data are getting them somewhere else. Zero email strings across three verticals, in the search response and on the place page.
Joining on place_id
Two identifiers ship on every row and they do different jobs: one deduplicates within and across runs, the other joins to anything you already have from Google.
API versus scraping
Google's own API is the right tool for looking up a place. It is a different proposition when the question is every business in a region, and the difference is structural rather than about price alone.
Reading the run summary
Four fields in the run summary decide whether your data covers the area you asked for. What each one means and which combinations should stop a pipeline.
Field reference
Every field the Actor returns, which are always present, which depend entirely on the market, and the four that are deliberately absent.
The refused countries
Aggregating name, phone and coordinates for hundreds of thousands of small businesses produces a personal-data file. Where that leads under the GDPR, UK GDPR and the LGPD.