Google Places

A directory with no businesses in it earns nothing, so Local Lab ships the tool that fills it. The Places scraper runs a text search against Google's Places API for each category and city you list, pulls the name, address, phone, website, rating and review count, then visits each website for an email, social links and a logo. It drops closed businesses, chains, the wrong kind of place and duplicates, assigns a category from keyword rules, and writes a CSV whose columns match the bulk importer.

Runs are checkpointed, so a stopped run resumes. A test run can be limited to a few searches to see what comes back before spending anything.

Worth knowing#

• Google bills this one. The admin page quotes the price per thousand text searches and a free monthly allowance, and shows a cost estimate before you run.

• The scraper is a laptop tool: the admin's Run button is blocked on a production server on purpose. Run it locally, import the CSV on the site.