Web Scraper for Google Maps
I created a management tool for a company called Zip, solving some problems and I still do updates for them as they need more features. They had an employee that I barely met, but he had left to another job. Whatever that job was he ended up having some tedious work they asked him to do and he wanted it to be easier and faster. So he reached out to me, remembering that I enjoy solving those kinds of problems.
His problem was that he was given a profession and a city. He was then to go onto Google Maps, search the city and profession and write down all the businesses, names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. And then do it with another city and profession they provided. It took ages for him to do this. Very tedious work.
I wrote him a script and instructions. He just had to go to Google Maps and search for what he wanted, and then run my script. My script would find all the data he needed on the page, forcing it to scroll, etc, and then print it out for him to copy and paste into a spreadsheet.
I could have gotten more automated with it but that’s all he needed. Took his hours of work down to seconds. He could complete a week or that work in 20 minutes.
Instructions Document
View the instructions document on Notion to see how the script works and try it yourself. The intention of this document was to provide instruction and also research to provide to my friend's boss easier ways of doing things and even faster versions if they paid Google for it.
