Google Maps Extractor

For instance I know there should be over 70 restaurants in city plaza alone.

In the attached image the yellow highlighted points seem to represent total number of restaurants in the complex (which is incorrectly about 28)....

If you could let me know whether this is a problem of google maps or apify that would be great

Hey, thanks for the report, we will check it out.

Hi, the OCR option doesn't find that many places compared to regular search (with search terms). Could you, please, take a look at this run and tell me whether the number results is acceptable? I searched for restaurants and found 149 places.

Btw I don't see your attached image. Can you try to attach it again?

Hi Ondrej

Thanks for getting back so soon! Unfortunately I'm no longer in the office so won't be able to send the screenshot until monday. However the region in particular that was indicative of a lack of data scraping is outlined in the attached jpeg.

With the latest scrape you sent through it seems like the performance is actually worse than the geofence that I produced originally.

The key attributes for the json file if I recall correctly were

zoom: 21 OCR: Open scrape Deep City Scrape: yes Geofence: yes

Is there anyway I can simply scrape all pois within a geofence with 100% duplication to the actual google maps website?

Hi Ondrej,

I'm attaching the POI Scraper JSON settings that I had previously used which wasn't quite collecting all POIs as desired.

Perhaps there's something wrong with my setting? If you could please have a look that would very helpful

Thanks

Hey, thanks for the data. I checked your run and indeed the actor missed a lot of places due to a bug. For example, it missed Cityplaza, shopping mall, which contains lots of places inside. Therefore, all of them were missed.

Let me share with you another run with the bug fixed. It scraped 3200+ places (about 1000 more than yours). I think this is the maximum of what we can scrape from this area.

Thanks Ondrej!

Could I just confirm that the included file is indeed the JSON settings that you used to to scrape 3200+ scrapes?

When comparing the two files 'POI_Scraper.json' and 'POI_Scraper_Ondrej.json' I think your code included

"reviewsFilterString": "", "placeMinimumStars": ""

Are there default reviewsFilterString and placeMinimumStars arguments that were curtailing the scrape results?

These are just default values that apify console added to the input for me. Sorry for the confusion. They don't have any effect on the results. From the actor's point of view, POI_Scraper.json and POI_Scraper_Ondrej.json are the same.

That’s strange… so last time I ran POI_scraper.json I think I was able to retrieve 2196 places. Whereas POI_scraper_Ondrej.json was able to scrape 3200+ places. With the actors running practically the same scrapes. I’m wondering what’s going on for this discrepancy…? Any thoughts welcome.