Released a new algorithm for traversing locations (dynamic zooming). This should generally find more results in a shorter time. Please report if you notice any degradation with your specific inputs.

2025-06-05

Features

Added Place IDs input option (JSON: placeIds) for specifying places to scrape with their ID. You'll find the option in "🔗 Scrape with Google Maps URLs or place IDs" section.

2025-05-26

Fixes

Correctly extract Parking Availability from the additionalInfo field for places that have it. Don't return null for unknown data formats.

2025-05-14

Features

Added "👥 Add-on: Business leads enrichment" section with two new options:
- maximumLeadsEnrichmentRecords ("⏩ Add-on: Extract business leads information - Maximum leads per place"): Allows setting the maximum number of leads to extract per place. By default set to 0, which means this feature is disabled
- leadsEnrichmentDepartments ("Leads departments selection"): Enables filtering leads by specific departments (C-Suite, Product, Engineering & Technical, Design, Education, Finance, Human Resources, Information Technology, Legal, Marketing, Medical & Health, Operations, Sales, Consulting)
- These options allow users to enrich their output with detailed business leads information, including employee names, job titles, emails, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, and company data
- The leads enrichment works only for places with websites and is priced at $0.003 per successfully enriched lead

2025-03-04

Features

Added language (in which the places were scraped in, based on the user input) to the resulting places

2025-02-21

Features

Added additionalOpeningHours (e.g. for Delivery or Drive through) and openingHoursBusinessConfirmationText (e.g. Confirmed by this business 6 weeks ago)

2025-02-09

Features

Added new output fields originalLanguage and translatedLanguage to reviews data

2025-01-21

Features

Added support for review detail URLs on the input - use startUrls field (Google-Maps-Reviews-Scraper)

2024-12-12

Features

Enabled deeperCityScrape by default and removed it from Input form. It can be still disabled in JSON.

2024-11-29

Features

Added reviewsOrigin option to choose whether to scrape all reviews or just reviews from Google.

2024-11-26

Features

Added scrapeTableReservationProvider input option (disabled by default) to scrape table reservation provider's data

2024-10-29

Features

Added mountain peak category

2024-10-01

Features

Added option to skip places based on (not) having website

2024-09-17

Features

Added swimming pool repair service category

2024-09-16

Features

Scraping user notes from public place lists - stored in userListNote

2024-09-03

Fixes

Added support for various formats of places lists URLs

2024-08-23

Features

Input fields that are related to reviews personal data (scrapeReviewerName, scrapeReviewerId, scrapeReviewerUrl, scrapeReviewId, scrapeReviewUrl) were merged into one - scrapeReviewsPersonalData.

2024-08-21

Features

Added vitamin & supplements store category

2024-08-08

Fixes

Fixed "Failed to parse coordinates" error that was occuring when start URLs didn't contain coordinates

2024-07-16

Features

Added bookingLinks

2024-07-16

Features

Added tableReservationLinks

2024-07-16

Fixes

Fixed scraping reviews attributes after Google changed its API

2024-06-03

Fixes

Fix missing review name after change from Google.
Fix rare problem with image URL causing place to be skipped.
Fix scraping from user-provided custom place list.
Properly parse wrongly encoded search terms in user-provided URLs.

Features

Enlarge review images. They are now in 1920x1080 resolution.

2024-05-17

Features

Added place's fid (feature ID) to the output

2024-05-07

Improvements

Significantly improved Scrape all places (no search term) by changing the scraping method.
- It is much faster
- It captures more places. We believe it is very close to 100% of the pins visible on the map. We will focus on validating different areas to ensure we are always getting 100% of all visible places.
- It doesn't require using the OCR actor anymore. This removes the extra memory requirement and fixes the issue that if your account runs out of memory, it might have missed some places.

Fixes

Fixed maxImages: 1 initiating image scrolling which made the scraper slower. This bug was introduced a few weeks ago.
Fixed consent screen in rare cases blocking a search page (this issue only happened in google-maps-extractor)

2024-05-03

Features

reviewsStartDate now supports both relative dates as number and time unit (e.g. 2 weeks, 7 months) and date with time in partial ISO format (e.g. 2024-05-03T12:00:00). Both of these now only work in JSON input but visual component is coming soon.

Fixes

Fixed webResults sometimes timeouting

2024-04-24

Features

added hotelStars to search results from search page

2024-04-23

Fixes

Improve capture rate for all_places_no_search_ocr. For several past versions, there was a bug that caused the search overlay to block part of the map.

2024-04-19

Features

Added support for relative dates in reviews date filter (JSON only).
Added filtering places based on their postalCode if it's defined in the input.
Added scraping image authors (image attributions). You can enable it by setting scrapeImageAuthors to true. In output, it will be stored in images field, where each item contains, imageUrl, authorName, authorUrl and uploadedAt.
Added handling of gps-proxy images URLs (those were inaccessible to users after scraping finishes) - actor is able to detect and replace them with non-gps URL.
Added price and cid fields to search results from search page

Improvements

Added categories: beach and public beach

2024-04-05

Features

You can scrape more questionsAndAnswers using a new maxQuestions input parameter.

Improvements

Improve capture rate of search using Google's "Search this area" option. This reveals lesser known places that Google doesn't show in normal searches. On average we see about 5-10% more places for the same area but for some rare search terms it can lead to up to 50% improvement.

Fixes

Scrape streetview image if a place has no images

BREAKING CHANGE

questionsAndAnswers is now an array, instead of an object. We try to avoid breaking changes where possible but since this questionsAndAnswers output field is not used often we decided to prioritize data cleanliness.

2024-03-13

Fixes

Fixed reviews text extraction

2024-03-08

Features

Added reviewOrigin to reviews - whether the review comes from Google, Tripadvisor or else.

2024-02-15

Fixes

Fixed reviews sorting after Google changed API

Improvements

Removed any browser interaction when scraping reviews to avoid timeouts. This should make the reviews scraping more stable and slightly faster.

2024-01-29

Fixes

Fixed image scraping
Fixed processing large amounts of search terms

2024-01-27

Fixes

Fixed placeMinimumStars although Google completely removed this search option, the scraper now post-filters the places. This option might be deprecated in the future.

2024-01-09

Features

Added more places categories

2023-12-04

Breaking change

Set minimum allowed memory to 512MB. The actor doesn't work well with less memory and runs were often crashing due to that.

Features

Added a new visitedIn field to the review data in the output. This field provides the date or time period of the reviewer's visit to the place

2023-12-04

Fixes

Fixed issue where scraping images timeouts if place has no images

Features

Add support for custom place list URLs

2023-11-23

Features

Added scrapeDirectories option to scrape places' directories (e.g. places inside malls)

2023-11-02

Fixes

neighborhood should contain correct value
Avoid wrong price values

2023-10-26

Fixes

Fix actor sometimes crashing completely. This was caused by previous release, you can resurrect the failed runs now to continue where it left off.

2023-10-25

Fixes

Fix scraping locations that don't have an address
Increase capture rate for "All places no search" option by about 10% by increasing the browser viewport

2023-10-23

Fixes

Fix search page scrolling after Google changed layout. This bug appeared today and caused that only 20 first places were captured on each search page

2023-10-18

Fixes

Properly handle places with no web results

2023-10-18

Fixes

Fixed geolocation: country resolution

Features

Added hotelAds field to output

2023-10-12

Features

Allow visualizing all scraped places in the "Live view" tab, allowing for real-time updates of the scraped places as the scraper runs.

2023-10-11

Fixes

Fixed reviews sorting after API change

2023-10-09

Fixes

Fixed reviews extraction that broke today after Google completely revamped their API. The new reviews scraping is a bit slower because it is paginating every 20 reviews.

2023-10-06

Features

Added categoryFilterWords to select & limit what exact Google categories should be scraped. You can also use the categories instead of search terms.

2023-09-21

Fixes

Update selector for displayedUrl in web results

Features

Released a separate Google Maps Scraper Orchestrator actor. It allows passing a list of locations and returns deduplicated results collected from multiple Google Maps runs. By running multiple runs in the background, it can utilize all your Apify account memory for maximum speed scraping.

2023-09-06

Features

Added hotelReviewSummary field to output

2023-08-21

Fixes

Fixed reviewsFilterString after Google redesign
Fixed orderBy for some specific place/language combinations
Improved subTitle extraction by extracting also from JSON data (Google uses this field for various meanings)
Fix formatting of peopleAlsoSearch if empty (it is empty array, used to by array of null values)

Features

Added imageCategories field to output

2023-08-08

Fixes

Fixed orderBy extraction
Skip search terms that redirect to a 'directions' type of page. This can happen for very long search terms that Google doesn't recognize as a place.

Features

Added skipClosedPlaces to input to skip permanently or temporarily closed places.

Changes

Scrape places also from partially matched search results (they include a section with Partial matches or Don't see what you're looking for?). These can be the places you want but Google is not sure about it. Usually, it has only about 2 places in the results. You can see a warning message in the log if the match was only partial.

2023-08-01

Fixes

Resolved issue with reviews and image scraping not working properly on some places after Google design change
Retry "bad query" search page result a few times because it can sometimes work only with specific proxy

2023-07-20

Fixes

Improve handling of searches that redirect to a single place. It is faster and more reliable now. Previously, the scraper retriggered the search which in rare cases might have loaded a different place.

2023-07-19

Hotfixes

Fixed changed layout for the heading of the detail page that completely broke the scraper for a moment

Features

Visualized results map is now auto updating with newly scraped places after being opened
allPlacesNoSearchAction can now be used in combination with startUrls if they don't contain a search term. This allows scraping only a single map page for all places (no search term).

2023-06-27

Features

Added placeMinimumStars input option to only include places that have an average rating higher than the provided input.

Fixes

Correctly handle places with no location (no lat/lon). We include these places because they are usually relevant to the search.
Don't cut off an extra review if it is added as we scrape the place or if Google has a wrong counter on the total reviews

2023-06-23

Fixes

Load data into the results map correctly for large datasets (was getting rate limited because of too fast loading).

2023-06-23

Features

Added an HTML page of a map that nicely visualizes all scraped places. It is stored in a Key-Value Store of each run. Currently, you need to reload the page if you want to display new places (if the scraper is still running) Auto-refreshing will come soon.

Added extraction of places (mainly hotels) from external services. Google shows these places when searching in certain locations. They are however not regular places with pins on the map and offer only partial data. These places are marked with 3 extra output fields: isExternalServicePlace, externalServiceProvider (e.g. Tripadvisor.com, Booking.com), and externalId.

Changes

deeperCityScrape now scans all cities from the database, not just those over 10,000 population.

Fixes

deeperCityScrape now creates circle polygons for cities with no polygon data in the database and does that also when the city area includes too large regions. This results in better performance and more places found.

Notes for future

We plan to merge the default whole-country search with the deeperCityScrape option in the next release (likely next week). This should bring the best of both worlds and scan the cities deeper while also traversing the countryside, just with a smaller zoom. This will result in higher compute usage for the same searches (while finding more results) but we will also enable adjusting the zoom level up or down to control the coverage and cost better.

2023-06-02

Features

Add deeperCityScrape input option to extract more places from larger areas like countries and regions. See the readme and input for a detailed explanation. This option will become the default behavior in the future.

2023-06-01

Fixes

Skip places that are imported from external services like Tripadvisor on search URLs like this. These places don't contain placeId and have generally different data format. Eventually, we plan to support them. For now, it seems like a rare occurrence.

2023-05-30

Fixes

Properly skip non-existent places (in case the user provides a wrong URL).
Don't auto-resurrect runs out of memory if they started with lower memory than 512MB or failed too often (this means the user needs to increase the memory before starting again).

2023-05-25

Fixes

Searches that redirect to a single place work again (this broke in the last update)
Properly handle search that doesn't find anything (Google changed the design of the page)
If the scraper reaches maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch or gets too many empty/redirect searches in a row (currently 20), it will quickly remove the rest of the searches for the same term from the queue. Previously it would blindly keep trying to scrape something there wasting resources.
Automatically resurrect the run if it hits Out of memory error. This started happening recently so we are still investigating the root cause.
Shuffle the starting map locations to reduce the number of duplicates or missing queries at the start.
Respect maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch when onlyDataFromSearchPage is used.

Features

On every failed run, the actor triggers another actor lukaskrivka/actor-fail-manager via webhook.
- It analyses the error and if appropriate it resurrects the run (e.g. in case of Out of memory error)
- It sends a report to the author to be able to promptly fix the issue or improve user experience if needed

2023-05-22

Fixes

Retry pages with allPlacesNoSearchAction that produce captchas (can happen at very high scraping speed)
Rotate browsers more often with allPlacesNoSearchAction to prevent captchas. This slows down the scraping slightly.
Better validate customeGeolocation longitude and latitude order. Fail if out of bounds and add a warning if the values look unreasonable (inside the ocean).

Changes

Add a new option onlyDataFromSearchPage (replaces exportPlaceUrls) which allows the extraction of some of the data from the search page without going to the place's detail page.
Deprecate exportPlaceUrls input option. As usual, we keep it backward compatible for a long-time.
Each output place item can contain a maximum of 5000 reviews so in case there are more reviews for that place, a duplicate place is stored with the next 5000 reviews and so on. E.g. in the case of 50,000 reviews, the resulting dataset will have 10 items with the same place. This limitation is due to the size limit of a single item in the Apify dataset.
Deprecate "allPlacesNoSearchAction": "all_places_no_search_mouse" input option as it was extremely slow. It now automatically fallbacks to all_places_no_search_ocr which is the only option now.

2023-05-02

Hotfixes

Scrolling in search and images didn't work at all for a while because the panel was moved.
Remove invalid image URLs

2023-04-15

Changes

Removed proxyConfiguration from input schema. This scraper works well with default datacenter proxies and changing it was causing issues. For special cases, proxy can stil be passed in proxyConfiguration field in JSON input.

2023-04-11

BREAKING CHANGES

Adjusting automatic zooming to set lower zoom for very small areas. Users rightfully complained that such high zoom produces too inefficient scrapes. The zoom curve is now flattened which means slighlty higher zoom for larger areas and significantly lower zoom for small areas. The highest automatic zoom is now capped at 17. The new example values are:

United States - 10 zoom (10,371,139 km2)
Germany - 12 zoom (380,878 km2)
London - 15 zoom (1,595 km2)
Manhattan - 16 zoon (87.5 km2)
Soho - 17 zoom (0.35 km2)

2023-04-10

Features

Correctly implement full geoJson specification for customGeolocation, you can now provide any valid type.
Cache geolocation resolutions in global KV store to speed up the start and lessen dependency on OpenStreetMap API.

2023-04-06

BREAKING CHANGES & fixes

Fixed and changed reviews translation after Google changed it. Now the text field contains the original text and textTranslated contains the translated text.
Due to this change, reviewsTranslation input setting is no longer required and was removed and we include both if available.

Features

Added reviewContext and reviewDetailedRating to all reviews where available. Examples in readme.

2023-04-04

BREAKING CHANGES

adjustZoomDynamically is now used for all geolocation input types!
locationQuery is now the prominent location input with prefilled value

Fixes

customGeolocation applies correct zoom again (this broke during the last release)

2023-03-29

BREAKING CHANGES

Added adjustZoomDynamically input option. This changes the zoom from constant table based on geolocation type (country = zoom 12, city = zoom 15, etc.) into a calculated value based on area of the found location. Realistically, this means that very big countries might have 1-2 smaller zoom while very small areas might have 2-5 higher zoom to get more detailed scrape. Below are some examples from the new calculation:

Minimum zoom from this is 19
United States - 9 zoom (10,371,139 km2)
Germany - 11 zoom (380,878 km2)
London - 16 zoom (1,595 km2)
Manhattan - 17 zoon (87.5 km2)
Soho - 19 zoom (0.35 km2)

Set adjustZoomDynamically to true for customGeolocation.

We plan to make this the default zoom setting in the near future.

2023-03-22

Features

Added support for shortened URLs (e.g. https://goo.gl/maps/...)

Fixes

Extract permanentlyClosed value from JSON data
Fixed rare problem that sometimes after migration, not all URLs were processed

2023-03-15

Fixes

menu output field is now extracted correctly again. The whole URL to the menu is provided now.

2023-03-14

Features

Added webResults field to output. You have to enable that in input with includeWebResults field. There is a small performance impact when this is enabled.

2023-03-13

Fixes

Large and low density countries like Russia and Canada are now scraped with lower zoom to make the scrape more efficient. This applies only if whole country should be scraped.

2023-03-09

Features

Add locationQuery input field. This can be used instead of country, state, city, etc. if those are not matching. This is mostly useful for very small states or regions. But it can also be used for free text description of the location.
Support Dominica country

2023-02-22

Features

Add reviewerPhotoUrl and reviewImageUrls field to review output

2023-02-22

Features

Add similarHotelsNearby field to output.

2023-02-16

Fixes

Updated price and description extraction to support more languages.

2023-02-15

Features

Improved reviews extraction, it's now faster and can extract more reviews.

2023-01-25

Fixes

Fixed issue with temporarilyClosed field not being extracted properly in some cases.

Features

Added updatesFromCustomers field to output.

"updatesFromCustomers": {
    "text": "Disneyland California Adventure small area with large park all inclusive celebrations. This is a glimpse into Los Reyes parade.  I'm a true fan. Thanks",
    "language": "en",
    "postDate": "a week ago",
    "postedBy": {
        "name": "Kayla Arredondo",
        "url": "https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/102968882116587973980?hl=en-US",
        "title": "Local Guide",
        "totalReviews": 225
    },
    "media": [
        {
            "link": "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/ggms/AF1QipNNaoT0NSbcWOPSduvZNqJ0kSqUs-dod32FeBtr=m18",
            "postTime": "a week ago"
        }
    ]
}

Added questionsAndAnswers field to output.

"questionsAndAnswers": {
    "question": "Which is the best easier way to drop off a family to Disneyland Park",
    "answer": "best way for drop off family is at down town Disney. Drop them off then you can take a short walk to the park. ",
    "askDate": "5 years ago",
    "askedBy": {
        "name": "Cecilia Salcedo",
        "url": "https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/109041536347893604294"
    },
    "answerDate": "5 years ago",
    "answeredBy": {
        "name": "Gabby Lujan",
        "url": "https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/105966144333216697667"
    }
}

2023-01-24

Fixes

Fixed extracting reserveTableUrl extraction for restaurants.

Features

Add reviewsFilterString to input that enables you to filter reviews by search string.
Add googleFoodUrl field to output.

2023-01-24

Fixes

Fixed place URL normalization sometimes not working. All place detail URL formats should work now, please open an issue if you find one that doesn't.

2023-01-24

Fixes

Fixed and reworked peopleAlsoSearch. It is now in this format, more fields will be added to it:

"peopleAlsoSearch": [
    {
        "category": "Czech restaurants",
        "title": "Restaurant Mlýnec",
        "reviewsCount": 2561,
        "totalScore": 4.7
    }
  ]

Changes

popularTimesHistogram, openingHours, additionalInfo and peopleAlsoSearch are now added to the data all the time. This means includeHistogram, includeOpeningHours, additionalInfo and includePeopleAlsoSearch input fields no longer have any effect.
To exclude these from data on Apify platform, use the omit URL parameter (e.g. add to dataset URL &omit=popularTimesHistogram,openingHours,additionalInfo,peopleAlsoSearch). This can also be chosen in the export UI.

2023-01-12

Features

Add reserveTableUrl field to output for restaurants.
Add reviewsTags and placesTags fields to output.

2023-01-13

BREAKING CHANGE

opening hours
- remove trailing "," after day
- always start with Monday (but only for English language)

2023-01-12

Features

Add description field to output.
Now we scrape hotel prices, and add the selected checkInDate and checkOutDate fields to the output (The price for hotels is based on these dates).
If the place is a hotel, add moreHotelsOptions field to output.

2023-01-10

Changes

The crawler now sets default maximum concurrency based on provided memory GBs. Currently, this is set to 4 times memory, so 4 GB actor will stop scaling up at 16 concurrency. This should prevent the crawler to overscale with network timeouts. You can still override this value with maxConcurrency input field.
The crawler sets starting concurrency at half the memory GBs, this is just improvement to help it start faster.
Slowed down upscaling to make the crawling smoother and reduce timeouts.

2023-01-09

Fixes

Gas price updateAt field is extracted correctly again (before this fix all dates were from 1970).

2023-01-02

Fixes

All tiny countries (and states) now work properly (some only if used without other geolocation parameters like city).

2022-12-22

Features

Add searchMatching to input that enables you to specify how the search term should match the place name.

2022-12-16

Fixes

Some countries like Korea, Tanzania and Congo were not found by the scraper.

2022-12-06

Features

Added hotelStars to output (example value "5-star hotel").

2022-11-22

Changes (to simplify input)

Removed lat and lng input fields from input schema but it will keep working as it is passed in input. Prefer using geolocation options like city or country instead. You can also still use it in direct URLs.
Removed maxAutomaticZoomOut input field from input schema. It will also keep working as it is.

Features

Added claimThisBusiness to output.

2022-11-21

Fixes

Fixed wrong location assigned to some smaller countries.

2022-11-10

Features

Added imagesCount to output. It is displayed even if you don't extract their URLs.

2022-09-23

Fixes

BREAKING CHANGE: Removed maxCrawledPlaces from input completely (use maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch instead)
Fixed maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch leading to scraper being hang out in some cases

2022-09-06

Fixes

Fixes unstable image extraction

2022-09-05

Fixes

Final round of optimizations and fixes of the search process. The scraper is now probably the fastest is has ever been finally reaching about 100 places per 1 compute unit even with using geolocation.

2022-09-02

Fixes

Several optimizations to speed up the search page (scrolling & enqueueing places)
Fixed extraction of images

2022-08-16

Fixes

Improve extraction of additional infos for hotels.

2022-08-15

Fixes

Fixed actor sometimes finishing prematurely when there were still requests in the queue (caused by the new background enqueueing system)

2022-08-05

Fixes

Fixed reviews duplications that sometimes happened.
Fixed extraction of the temporarilyClosed field.

2022-08-03

Fixes

Fixed reviews extraction. After Google's change, the scraper was giving only up to 10 reviews. Now it works fully again. newest doesn't sort properly though yet.

2022-07-21

Fixes

Finish fast when less than 120 places are found on a page. Previous implementation waited several seconds extra.

2022-07-20

Fixes

Search pages now use scrolling instead of pagination. This makes the crawling a little slower and reduces the maximum number of places per page from 400 to 120. Use geolocation with zoom to work around this reduction. We might increase the default zoom by 1. in the near future.

2022-05-19

Features

Added gasPrices to output. Available only for gas stations in US to the best of our knowledge.

2022-05-02

Fixes

subTitle extraction works now

2022-04-04

Fixes

Blocked responses on the search page now properly retry the request (no more unhandled promise rejection)
Smoother search page pagination
More informative logs
Fixed consent approval if browser crashes

2022-03-16

Fixes

maxCrawledPlaces + exportPlaceUrls was giving inconsistent number of results.

2022-03-14

Features

Added allPlacesNoSearch to input. This option allows you to scrape all places shown on the map without the need for any search term.
Added reviewsStartDate to input to extract only reviews newer than this date.
Added radiusKm to the Point type in customGeolocation

2022-03-04

Improvement

additionalInfo extraction is faster now.
additionalInfo extraction for hotels and similar categories is more complete now: Data which is not displayed on the Google page but present in the Google response is also extracted.

2022-03-03

Lowering the default zoom values. The past setup made the scraping too slow and costly. The new defaults will speed up the scraping a lot while missing only a few places. You can still manually override the zoom parameter. New default values are: country or state -> 12 county -> 14 city -> 15 postalCode -> 16 no geolocation -> 12

2022-02-28

Fixes

location extraction works in (almost) all cases now (search URLs and URLs with place IDs will always work).

2022-02-21

Features

Added oneReviewPerRow to input to enable expanding reviews one per output row

2022-02-17

Fixes

openingHours extraction works in almost all cases now (search URLs and URLs with place IDs will always work).

2022-01-12

Start URLs now correctly work from uploaded CSV files or Google Sheets. It uses to trim part of the URL.

2022-01-11

Changed polygon input field to customGeolocation
Added deeper section into Reamde on how you can provide your own exact coordinates

2022-01-11

Breaking changes We decided it is time to change several default parameters to make the user experience smoother. These changes should not have a big effect on currect users.

city and other geolocation parameters will have preference over lat & long if both are used (in 99% cases users want to use the automatic location splitting to get the most results which doesn't work with direct lat & long)
zoom will no longer have a default value 12. Instead, it will change based on geolocation type like this:

country or state -> 12 county -> 14 city -> 17 postalCode -> 18 no geolocation -> 12

Users will still be able to specify the zoom and override this behavior.

See Readme for more details

2021-12-14

Breaking change

reviewsSort is now set to newest by default. This is because some places don't yield all reviews on other sortings (we are not sure if this is a bug or silent block on Google's side)

2021-11-15

Fixes

exportPlaceUrls now properly dedupes the URLs
added categories fields listing all categories the place is listed in

2021-11-11

Fixes

Fixed additionalInfo for hotels
Fixed exportPlaceUrls not checking for correct geolocation

2021-11-09

Fixes

website field now displays the full URL. This fixes issue of blank facebook.com links.

2021-11-05

Fixes

Fixed new layout of additionalInfo

2021-11-03

Fixes

Improved reliability of scraping place detail, reviews and images (improving scrolling and back button interaction)

2021-10-13

Features

Added menu to output
Added price to output

2021-10-07

Fixes

Fixed popularTimesHistogram which caused crash on some pages

2021-09-27

Fixes

Fixed image extraction & make it optional (it should not crash the whole scrape)

2021-09-15

Fixes

Fixed temporarilyClosed and permanentlyClosed
Added a step for normalizing input Start URLs because those with wrong format don't contain JSON data

2021-09-14

Fixes

Fixed popular times live and histogram

2021-09-10

https://github.com/drobnikj/crawler-google-places/pull/185 https://github.com/drobnikj/crawler-google-places/issues/181

Fixes

In like 10% cases, the reviews are in wrong order and there is less of them. We didn't find a root cause yet but we retry the page so the output gets corrected.

2021-09-07

Breaking fix

If you did not pass maxReviews in the input at all (undefined), it scraped 5 reviews as default. That was against the input schema description so it is now fixed to scrape 0 reviews in those cases.

2021-09-01

Fixes

Fixed placeId extraction that was broken for some inputs
Fixed missing imageUrls

Features

Added option to input URLs with CID (Google My Business Listing ID) to start URLs, e.g. https://maps.google.com/?cid=12640514468890456789
Added cid to output

2021-08-25

Fixes

Fixed maxCrawledPlaces not finishing quickly for large country-wise searches. maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch still has this problem

2021-08-12

Fixes

Fixed problem that startUrls was not picking up all provided URLs sometimes (due to automatic uniqueKey resolution)
likesCount in reviews

2021-08-06

Fixes

maxCrawledPlaces now compares to total sum of all places

Features

Added maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch to limit max places per search term or search URL

2021-07-26

Fixes

Address is now parsed correctly into components even when you supply direct place IDs
Migrated code from apify 0.22.5 to 1.3.1

2021-07-13

Added county to geolocation options

2021-06-03

Fixes (hopefully last fixes after the layout change)

Scraping all images per place works again
Fixed additionalInfo
Fixed openiningHours

2021-06-03

Fixes

Fix handling of search pages without results
Skip empty searches that sometimes users accidentally post

2021-05-25

Features

Added orderBy attribute to result scrape

2021-05-18

Fixes

Fully or partially fixed consent screen issues
Should also help with Failed to set the 'innerHTML' property on 'Element': This document requires 'TrustedHTML' assignment. which is caused by injecting JQuery into constent screen

2021-04-29

Fixes

Fixed reviewsTranslation

2021-04-28

Fixes after Google changed layout, not everything was fixed. Next batch of fixed asap!

Fixed additional data
Fixed search pagination getting into infinite loop
Fixed empty search handling
Fixed reviews not being scraped
Fixed totalScore

2021-03-22

Warning - Next version will be a breaking one as we will remove personal data from reviews by default. You will have to explicitly enable the fields below. Features

Added input fields to selectively pick which personal data fields to scrape - scrapeReviewerName, scrapeReviewerId, scrapeReviewerUrl, scrapeReviewId, scrapeReviewUrl, scrapeResponseFromOwnerText

2021-03-17

Fixes

Removed duplicate reviews + all reviews scraped correctly
reviewsSort finally works correctly
Reviews scraping is now significantly faster
Handle error that irregularly happened when scraping huge amount of reviews

Features

Added reviewsDistribution
Added publishedAtDate (exact date), responseFromOwnerDate and responseFromOwnerText for each review

2021-03-10

Fixes:

totalScore and reviewsCount are now correctly extracted for all languages
startUrls now correctly work non-.com domains and on detail places

2021-02-02

Fixes:

Search keyword that links only to a single place (like "London Eye") now works correctly

2021-01-27

Features:

Address is parsed into neighborhood, street, city, postalCode, state and countryCode fields
Added reviewsTranslation option to adjust how Google translates reviews from non-English languages
Parsing ads. This means a bit more results. Those that are ads have "isAdvertisement": true field.
Added useCachedPlaces option to load places from your KV Store. Useful if you need to scrape the same places regularly.
Added polygon option to provide your own geolocation polygon.

Fixes:

This one is big. We removed the infamous Place is outside of required location (polygon) error. The location of a place is now checked during paginating and these places are skipped. This means a massive speed up of the scraper.

2021-01-11

Features:

Automatic screenshots of errors to see what went wrong
Added searchPageUrl to output
Added PLACES-OUT-OF-POLYOGON record to Key-Value store. You can check what places were excluded.

Fixes:

Fixed rare bug with saving stats
Improvement in review sorting - but it is still not ideal, more work needs to be done

2020-11-16

Added postal code geolocation to input
Improved errors when location is not found
Optimization - Removed geolocation data from intermediate requests

2020-10-29

Fixed handling of Google consent screen
Better input validation and deprecation logs
Changed default for maxImages to 1 as it doesn't require scrolling for the main image
imageUrls are returned with the highest resolution

2020-10-27

Removed forceEng input in favor of language

2020-10-15

The default setup now uses maxImages: 0 and maxReviews: 0 to improve efficiency

2020-10-01

added several browser options to input - maxConcurrency, maxPageRetries, pageLoadTimeoutSec, maxPagesPerBrowser, useChrome
rewamped input schema and readme
Added reviewerNumberOfReviews and isLocalGuide to reviews

2020-09-22

added few extra review fields (ID, URL)

2020-07-23 small features

New features

add an option for caching place location
add an option for sorting of reviews
add stats logging

2020-07 polygon search and bug fixes

breaking change

reworked input search string

Bug fixes

opening hour parsing (#39)
separate locatedIn field (#32)
update readme

New features

extract additional info - Service Options, Highlights, Offerings,.. (#41)
add maxReviews, maxImages (#40)
add temporarilyClosed and permanentlyClosed flags (#33)
allow to scrape only places urls (#29)
add forceEnglish flag into input (#24, #21)
add searching in polygon using nominatim.org
add startUrls
added maxAutomaticZoomOut to limit how far can Google zoom out (it naturally zooms out as you press next page in search)