Google Maps - Reviews Work < 50% time

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1

Great Job on this GM scraper .. but I’ve noticed that the review scraping is not reliable. In my testing, even though the google maps listing shows they have 100+ reviews, no reviews comes in more than half the time. sometimes i have entire spreadsheet without any reviews from any listings, all of which say they have reviews.

I ran the Google Maps tester in Settings and it came out fine, with reviews for 1 listing. But I noticed it seemed to struggle. i think it might not be giving it enough time or something. I am using windows latest version.

How to fix?

2

Its to do with the google maps window not being painted in a visible window on the desktop.

When its hidden it is less reliable.

Maybe I can give you a ‘show google maps window’ checkbox so that the windows will show on your desktop.

But then you won’t be able to use PC as windows will keep appearing and disappearing.

If you want to try this out to see if it works I can go ahead and add a secret toggle for you.

3

I’m willing to try it … In production, I will be running this on another PC, so its okay.

PS: there is another scraper where they can pull reviews on every listing and they can get at least 100 listings per town (without showing a visible window) .. so it is technically possible.

4

can you share more info about that other tool? maybe there is some tech we can steal for SCM?

6

Yeh nothing immediate about how it works in background.

Would need to download a demo to figure out how it works inside.

In mean time I uploaded a new update, tell me if reviews come more consistently or not.

Thanks

7

I’m using v25.4.924 … no further updates are showing to download … but the reviews are still coming in less than 50% of the time. :frowning:

8

You got these new messages?

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9

Right now in the code it scrolls, then waits 4secs, then it scrolls again and waits 4 secs. So 2 sets of scrolls.If we want it to work better, I would add 1 extra set of scrolls.But lets see if the changes now are good enough or require some extra tweaking to get right.

Yes .. i ran some tests and listings are coming in alot better .. reviews are slightly better than before but still struggling. Can you open it up to allow us to tweak the variables, # scrolls, delays, timeouts etc … for both listings and reviews so we could tweak it ourselves and see which values work best. That’s what other scrapers like scrapebox do .. because these change as google changes their platform.

10
11

Ever since most recent update, # of scrapable google reviews is now much lower than when you fixed it before. Now it stops at just a few reviews for most listings (even if the listings has hundreds of reviews). It was working better before.

12

Haven’t made any changes to review scraping code since the changes above.

Need to investigate.

13

I had a closer inspection and I found that the code used to determine if SCM is on the review page was incorrectly returning yes on the summary page.

Which at the moment, google has inserted part of the review tab into summary page.

To fix this, SCM will always ignore the first summary page when trying to look for reviews.

Fixed in next update.