Missing `placeId` field in scraped data

[xavier-villelegier]

Hey 👋

First off, thanks for this awesome scraper, it works great!

I ran into a limitation though: it looks like the scraped data doesn’t include the placeId field. Since the official Google Places API only works with placeIds, it’s hard to use this scraper alongside it.

My use case: I’m trying to backfill data for places I originally fetched via the official Google Places API, so I need to ensure I’m updating the correct places.

Currently, the only workaround I’ve found is to extract the placeId from the reviews_link, but this fails for places without reviews since that field is empty.

From what I can tell, the placeId should be extractable as it’s present in the network calls/elements when loading Google Maps pages.

Example: In this Google Maps search, you can find the placeId: ChIJ1cnDekx_kEcRJ4mRcPw4XXo

Would it be possible to include the placeId in the scraped output? Thanks a lot! 🙏

[gosom]

I need to research how to extract that. How do you know that this is the placeId?

[xavier-villelegier]

@gosom It’s the same identifier returned by the official Google Places API for that exact place. You can also see it directly in Google Maps: when you open the place and check the network calls, the placeId appears in the payload. Also, it's the same id in the reviews link query param (?placeid=…)

This would allow us to have an exact 1:1 match between places from the API and places from the Scraper, so that we can combine both usages 🙏