How to Scrape Google Maps
We'll take a look at to find businesses through Google Maps search system and how to scrape their details using either Selenium, Playwright or ScrapFly's javascript rendering feature - all of that in Python.
Taking headless browser screenshots can be a useful debugging and data collection tool when web scraping. With Selenium and Python, to take screenshots the save_screenshot() method can be used to capture the whole page or a specific area:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://httpbin.org/html")
# For whole page
# we can save directly to a given filename
driver.save_screenshot('screenshot.png')
# or retrieve to python objects
screenshot_png_bytes = driver.get_screenshot_as_png()
screenshot_base64_string = driver.get_screenshot_as_base64()
# For specific element we should find the element first and then capture it:
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
element = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, 'p')
element.screenshot('just-the-paragraph.png')
driver.close()
Note that when scraping dynamic pages screenshot command might run before page is fully loaded thus missing important details. For that refer to How to wait for page to load in Selenium?
For more, see web scraping with Selenium and Python
We'll take a look at to find businesses through Google Maps search system and how to scrape their details using either Selenium, Playwright or ScrapFly's javascript rendering feature - all of that in Python.
Introduction to web scraping dynamic javascript powered websites and web apps using Selenium browser automation library and Python.
Introduction to using web automation tools such as Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium and ScrapFly to render dynamic websites for web scraping
