Google Earth Location Scraper

A robust Apify Actor that scrapes location data directly from Google Earth.

Features

• Direct Google Earth Scraping: Extracts data from Google Earth's internal Search API.
• Headless Chromium with software WebGL: Renders Google Earth's 3D interface in a fully headless Docker environment (no virtual display required).
• No API Keys Required: Does not require a Google Maps API key.
• Precise Coordinates: Extracts latitude, longitude, place name, description, and Google's internal place ID directly from the same internal API Google Earth's own UI uses.

Input

The actor accepts the following input options:

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchQueries	array	['Eiffel Tower']	List of location names or addresses to search for.
minDelayBetweenRequests	integer	2	Minimum delay (in seconds) between search requests.
maxDelayBetweenRequests	integer	5	Maximum delay (in seconds) between search requests.

Example Input

{
    "searchQueries": [
        "Eiffel Tower",
        "Statue of Liberty",
        "Burj Khalifa"
    ],
    "minDelayBetweenRequests": 2,
    "maxDelayBetweenRequests": 5
}

Output

The actor outputs the scraped data to the default dataset. Every field is only included when it was actually found - no placeholder or fabricated values are ever emitted. One result is produced per search query (Google Earth's own top-ranked/best-name match), or no result at all if the query genuinely didn't resolve to a location.

• search_query: The query used to find the location.
• place_name: The name of the place found.
• latitude: Latitude coordinate.
• longitude: Longitude coordinate.
• description: Brief description (if available), e.g. "Tower in Paris, France".
• google_place_id: Google's internal place ID (format 0x...:0x...), when available.
• data_source: How the coordinates were obtained - search_api (Google Earth's internal search API, the reliable path) or url_fallback (parsed from the page URL when the API didn't respond in time).
• url: The Google Earth URL for the location.
• scraped_at: Timestamp of extraction.

Example Output

{
    "search_query": "Eiffel Tower",
    "place_name": "Eiffel Tower",
    "latitude": 48.85837,
    "longitude": 2.294481,
    "description": "Tower in Paris, France",
    "google_place_id": "0x47e66e2964e34e2d:0x8ddca9ee380ef7e0",
    "url": "https://earth.google.com/web/search/Eiffel+Tower/...",
    "data_source": "search_api",
    "scraped_at": "2025-11-28T12:00:00.000000"
}

Technical Details

This scraper runs a fully headless Chromium browser (Chromium's "new" headless mode with ANGLE/SwiftShader software-rendered WebGL) to load Google Earth's 3D interface without needing a real display or GPU. For each search query it opens a fresh browser tab, intercepts the network traffic Google Earth's own client generates, and decodes the raw response from Google's internal search API to extract the location data - the same data Google Earth's UI itself uses to fly the camera to a place.