

Ask HN:  Feasible to access google maps DB - cgherb911

This is what I want to do.  Google has a database with businesses information tied to a gps location.  Is there a way to access this data (while not being employed by google)??<p>Thanks HN.
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jacquesm
Essentially you're asking if it is possible to scrape google maps.

I'd start with analyzing the javascript code that creates the map view, it has
to have some way of retrieving the info layer given a map coordinate.

After that you can try to see if you can access that information without going
through the browser.

There are commercial vendors of such information too.

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vannevar
Google gets much of their data from Tele Atlas (now TomTom):
www.teleatlas.com. The other big player in geo data is NavTeq: www.navteq.com.
I think there are some crowd-sourced public geo databases as well.

