Crawling Google Maps: Map Data Collection

Why do I have to use a proxy IP for map data?

Recently, a lot of local life service friends asked me, want to batch grab Google Maps merchant information, the results just grabbed a few hundred accounts will be blocked. This thing is like playing hide and seek - you hide well, the other side of the open thermal imager immediately appeared.

Ordinary web requests are like students in uniform, webmasters can scan them and know they are crawlers. At this pointproxy IPIt's the equivalent of giving each request a different dress hat to make the server think the requests are coming from real users around the world.

Take a real case: a restaurant chain wants to expand the Southeast Asian market and needs to capture local business district data. Initially, they used fixed IP to collect the data, and the result was blacked out by Google Maps in 3 hours. Later, they changed to use ipipgo's dynamic residential agent, and successfully captured more than 20,000 merchants' information in 7 countries, which increased the efficiency of data acquisition by more than 20 times.

What are the doors to look for when choosing a proxy IP?

There are so many agent service providers in the market, but 90% are not suitable for map data collection. Here to draw a key comparison table:

Special reminder: don't be cheap to buy the kind of shared proxy of a few dollars, this kind of service IP duplication rate is so high that it is scary. There is a friend to do logistics cheap, the results of the collection to half found 20 accounts actually share the same Brazilian IP, directly by Google a pot end.

Hands-on with agent acquisition

Here's a Python example to demonstrate how to access the Google Maps API with ipipgo's proxy:

import requests

 Proxy information from ipipgo
proxy_config = {
    "http": "http://user:pass@gateway.ipipgo.com:9020",
    "https": "http://user:pass@gateway.ipipgo.com:9020"
}

 Disguise as a normal browser
headers = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 ..."
}

response = requests.get(
    "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/nearbysearch/json",
    params={"location": "40.7128,-74.0060", "radius": 1500}, proxies=proxy_configuration
    proxies=proxy_config,
    headers=headers,
    timeout=10
)

Note three key points:

1. Randomly switch geographic location per request (ipipgo supports location by city level)
2. The request intervals should simulate the operation of real people, and it is recommended that there should be randomized pauses of 3-8 seconds.
3. Don't fight with CAPTCHA, use ipipgo's auto-change IP function.

Guidelines for demining common pitfalls

QA 1: Why was I blocked even though I used a proxy?
It may be a problem of IP purity. Some resellers will recycle used IPs, so we suggest that you enable the "First Time IP" function in the ipipgo background to make sure that each IP is brand new and unused.

QA 2: What should I do if I suddenly run out of data in the middle of collection?
Check IP availability, a good proxy service should have real time monitoring. For example, ipipgo's control panel displays the health status of each IP and immediately switches lines when abnormalities are detected.

QA 3: What if I need to collect specific small language areas?
This is the time to go with a service that supports precise targeting. Like ipipgo can pinpoint IP assignments down to the city level, for example, to grab information about izakaya in Osaka, you can directly target residential IPs in Osaka, Japan.

Private advice from data veterans

Recently, I found a trick when I helped a travel platform to do data collection: use proxy IP and browser fingerprints together. For example, using ipipgo's mobile IP + Chrome mobile UA, so that the collection success rate can be more than 98%.

There's also a tawdry maneuver - the holiday collection method. We found that Google Maps will relax its wind control during Christmas, probably because there are fewer people on duty. At this time with ipipgo's European IP batch collection, the efficiency is more than 3 times higher than usual.

Lastly, we would like to remind you that data collection should comply with local laws and regulations, and it is recommended to control the frequency of reasonable requests. After all, the use of proxy IP is only a technical means, business ethics is the basis.