How to Build a Free Google Maps Email Scraper in NADN Without Third-Party APIs

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How to Build a Free Google Maps Email Scraper in NADN Without Third-Party APIs

Building automation tools that extract business contact information can be incredibly valuable for lead generation and market research. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore how to create a powerful Google Maps email scraper using NADN (No-code Automation Development Network) without relying on expensive third-party APIs.

Understanding the System Architecture

The system we’re building works by:

  • Taking search queries from a Google Sheet
  • Performing Google Maps searches based on those queries
  • Extracting business websites from the search results
  • Visiting each website to extract email addresses
  • Storing the collected emails in a separate Google Sheet

Step-by-Step Implementation

1. Setting Up the Initial Structure

Start by creating a new workflow in NADN and adding a manual trigger. While you could connect this directly to a Google Sheet for automated processing, a manual trigger simplifies the testing process.

2. Creating the Google Maps Search Request

Add an HTTP request node with the following settings:

  • URL format: www.google.com/maps/search followed by your search term (e.g., Calgary+Dentist)
  • Enable “Ignore SSL issues”
  • Include response headers and status

When executed, this request returns HTML content containing information about businesses matching your search criteria.

3. Extracting Website URLs

Use a code node with JavaScript to extract website URLs from the HTML response:

  • Parse the input data from the previous node
  • Apply a regular expression pattern to identify website URLs
  • Return the extracted URLs in the format NADN expects

This code extracts all URLs from the Google Maps search results page.

4. Filtering Relevant Websites

Add a filter node to remove irrelevant domains:

  • Filter out URLs containing terms like “schema”, “google”, and “gstatic”
  • This ensures you’re only processing actual business websites

5. Removing Duplicate URLs

Add a “Remove duplicates” node to eliminate repeated website URLs. This optimization prevents unnecessary processing and reduces the risk of being flagged for scraping.

6. Setting Up the Website Scraping Loop

Create a loop structure to process each website individually:

  • Add a “Loop over items” node
  • Include a one-second wait between requests (to avoid IP blocking)
  • Set HTTP requests to “Do not follow redirects” to prevent redirect loops
  • For testing purposes, use a limit node to process just a few items

7. Extracting Email Addresses

Within the loop, add another code node to extract email addresses from each website:

  • Use a regular expression pattern designed to identify email addresses
  • Return all found email addresses in an array

8. Processing the Results

After the loop completes:

  • Filter out null entries (websites with no emails found)
  • Flatten the array of email addresses
  • Remove any duplicate emails

9. Storing the Results

Finally, add an “Append row in sheet” node to save the extracted emails to your Google Sheet.

Advanced Techniques and Considerations

Extending the Scraper’s Capabilities

To improve email discovery rates, consider:

  • Scraping sub-pages within each website, not just homepages
  • Creating a multi-level scraping system that first extracts internal URLs from each website
  • Using a secondary loop to process these internal pages for email addresses

Avoiding Rate Limits

For larger-scale scraping operations:

  • Implement proxies to prevent IP blocking
  • Consider using SERP (Search Engine Results Page) proxies specifically designed for search engine scraping
  • Add longer delays between requests for more natural behavior patterns

Practical Applications

This system can be adapted for various use cases:

  • Lead generation for sales teams
  • Market research across different geographic areas
  • Competitor analysis
  • Building targeted email marketing lists

Final Thoughts

Building your own scraping system in NADN offers significant advantages over paid solutions, including cost savings and complete customization control. While this approach requires some technical understanding, the step-by-step process outlined here makes it accessible even to those with limited coding experience.

By following these guidelines and respecting website terms of service and privacy considerations, you can create a powerful tool for gathering business contact information directly from Google Maps search results—all without expensive API subscriptions or third-party services.

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