Ernest Hamilton IT Fun 06.29.2021 11:Jun AM EDT

3 Powerful Ways to Scrape Google For Data

The undisputed giant of the internet age, Google is the most visited website in the world and dominates the search engine market. Billions of people use Google tools and websites every day. That means that a lot of data passes through Google's servers. Could some of that data help your business?

Google provides powerful and developer-friendly APIs for many of their top products. If you aren't familiar with the term API, it means application programming interface. An API enables software applications to talk to each other and exchange data. So if you use Google's APIs, you can work with Google Maps or Google Search to get data that you can use in your own applications. That's great, but what if you want to do more than is possible with the official APIs?

We're going to explore 3 of Google's biggest tools and show you what kind of data you can extract and use to enhance your business, study, or research. Or, as a smart alternative, you can use ZenRows' web scraping API to easily extract any data from Google and any other sites.

These methods use web scraping. You've probably heard a lot about that recently, as more and more companies are turning to modern, efficient ways of collecting data. Web scraping just means that you use a script, or bot, to crawl a web page or website and collect data. The data is saved in a structured format that's perfect for using in databases, other applications, or spreadsheets.

Getting more from Google Maps

Google Maps has over one billion monthly active users and provides driving directions for 194 countries. That's just about the entire planet. On top of that, Google Places stores local information for more than 80 million places around the world. Those locations include businesses, shops, museums, tourist destinations, and more. Each location in the Google Maps database contains information on opening hours, popular times, reviews, photos, address, phone numbers, and plenty of other useful data.

That kind of data is perfect for aggregating and repurposing. You can probably already think of potential ways to take the information and repackage it for users in new and exciting ways. Combine opening hours with popular times and reviews to create tourist guides, scrape addresses and phone numbers to identify potential leads, or even just create aggregators to provide your users with the information they want without them having to look anything up themselves.

But unfortunately, the official Google Maps API and Google Places API have limits on how much data an individual user can extract from their databases. For instance, you can only download up to 5 reviews and 10 photos using the official API. You can't build a business with those kinds of limits.

Luckily, there are tools to do more. Apify has a range of Google scrapers, including one that lets you get unlimited results from Google Maps.

Why you might want to scrape Google Search

Google Search is even bigger than Google Maps. There are more than 3.5 billion searches made on Google every day. If a business isn't doing well in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) then it isn't doing well in the real world.

Again, Google Search has vast amounts of data on companies, brands, products, and customers. It also has data on your competitors. Here are just some of the ways you could use Google Search data to better understand your business and its place in the world:

Search engine optimization (SEO): you can monitor how your website performs on Google over time, based on what you need to know and what information is important to you.
Collect data on display ads that were shown for a particular set of keywords and see how you can do better in your own advertising.
Monitor both the organic and paid results of your direct competitors or your field of business.
Build a URL list for particular keywords so that you know who to contact, which websites are relevant to you, or what websites to target for other web scraping projects.

To get this kind of data, you'll need to use a SERP API tool like Apify's Google Search Results Scraper, which has full support for proxies to enhance performance and allow for full geographical freedom, wherever your business is based.

Keep up to date with Google Trends

Finally, Google Trends isn't as high profile as Google Maps and Google Search, but it can make you very powerful when it comes to predicting what will be big in the future.

Google Trends shows you what people have been searching for around the globe and what ideas and fashions are just starting to emerge. Analyzing this at scale can give you superpowers, as you can find out what you should invest in, or where you can best spend your resources.

There are lots of ways that Google Trends can inspire you to make the right business decisions or adjust your strategy:

Property values can change rapidly. Checking up on the number of searches for a particular area could let you get ahead on buying property or providing services in a neighborhood.
E-commerce retailers can work out the best products to get into by seeing whether there is an upward trend for certain products or brands. Dropshippers can fine-tune their offering to really boost their margins.
Journalists can research hot topics and keep an eye on what interests their target audience, with precision based on location or time range.
If you're looking for new business opportunities, you can use Google Trends to fine niche markets. Time your business just right and you can profit from viral spikes in interest or seasonal trends.
Keyword research can help you refine your business and find related topics or keywords. Scrape keywords in bulk, import them into your favorite spreadsheet program and analyze what you need to offer next.
Keep an eye on your competitors by seeing how well they perform versus your brand. Make sure you stay one step ahead.