Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Scrape data from Google maps

Scrapping data from Google maps made by third party

Often, you will find Google maps published by someone you don't have access to and you really want to extract some data from the map.

Lets consider this map below, assuming it was published by someone you don't know and you have to have access to the raw data behind the map.



When you click on individual features on the map, the required data of that point is displayed on the left side panel. Now, the task is to extract or collect those data for every point feature on the map into a spreadsheet for further use/consumption.




Step to extract the data

Here is how to go about extracting such dataset.

Step 1: On the main page, click on the three vertical dots to expand the menu


Step 2: Select "Download KML" to download a file that can be read by Google Earth software, text editor and other GIS software.




Step 3: Open this downloaded KML file in any software of your choice to access the data contained there in. In my case, I used QGIS to open the kml file and exported the content into a CSV/Excel spreadsheet.

That is it!
Now if you come across any Google maps that you want to access the data used in preparing the map, that is how to go about accessing it. Enjoy!

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