So naturally, the way around this per-coordinate limitation is to just use more and more coordinates, essentially running a lot of “micro” searches (getting up to 60 results back), but at slightly different locations to “sweep” the entire city.

While it would be great if we could give Google the “bounding box” coordinates and have it return ALL the businesses within that box, unfortunately their API is not so nice and instead relies on us providing a single latitude and longitude to run a search on, and then the API will give us back only a mere 60 results per coordinate.

The results will not only give us the center coordinates, but a “bounding box” (well… technically a rectangle) of coordinates we can use:Ģ. The Stevesie Google Maps Place Search Integration will let you easily get the coordinates, just supply your API key and enter your target city under name, like “New York,” into the Query input, then hit execute: You can use the Place Search Endpoint from Google Maps to do this, as “cities” are also technically “places” according to the Google API. The first step is to get the latitude and longitude of the city you want to collect the business from. Disclaimer: I, the author of this article, happen to own the Stevesie Data Platform. If you do not want to use a paid platform, then you can refer to the links above and directly access the Google Places API at your own time, expense and effort.

Stevesie Data is a paid platform and the rest of this article assumes you have the plus plan for running workflows. The rest of this article will discuss how to use the Stevesie Data Platform to collect a large list of businesses (including details like website, phone number & revent reviews) for a given city, like New York.

If you’ve been using unofficial “screen scraping” to download Google Maps data, you may want to consider using the official Google Places API, as it’s an “official integration,” meaning it will not break suddenly and you don’t risk Google banning you for violating their Terms of Service.

Download list on google maps