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Getting All Reviews From the Official Google Maps API
The official Google places API limits the number of reviews you can fetch from it to 5 reviews only. Despite many developers asking for pagination and sorting parameters since 2015, the limitation still exists. Fortunately, there are some tools you can use from your code to get ratings & reviews in the right way.
The Ultimate Way of Fetching Reviews
With Outscraper’s API, you can fetch any amount of reviews from any business. You can sort the reviews and paginate over the pages. It’s possible to ignore empty reviews by using the “ignoreEmpty” parameter, and there are many advanced parameters like cutoff, cutoffRating, etc.
Reviews API Examples
The basic example of fetching 20 reviews by the default sorting (most relevant reviews).
# fetch 20 most relevant reviews
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=20&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"
The sort parameter might be one of the following: “most_relevant” (default), “newest,” “highest_rating,” and “lowest_rating.”
# fetch reviews with highest rating first
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=20&sort=highest_rating&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"
# fetch reviews with lowest rating first
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=20&sort=lowest_rating&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"
In addition to the reviewsLimit parameter, you can specify cutoffRating. The parameter specifies the maximum for “lowest_rating” or the minimum for “highest_rating” ratings for reviews.
# fetch reviews with 5 and 4 stars ratings only
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=1000&sort=highest_rating&cutoffRating=4&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"
The cutoff parameter will help you fetch only the newest reviews till the specific date in the past. It might be helpful when you have all the reviews in your database and want to fetch only the reviews that were added since your last update.
# fetch reviews till the specific date (cutoff)
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=250&sort=newest&cutoff=1629269269&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"
You can use built-in pagination to fetch many pages of reviews. Use the skip parameter to control where API begins returning results.
# page 1, sorted by newest
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=20&sort=newest&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"
# page 2, sorted by newest
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=20&sort=newest&skip=20async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"
Fetching many reviews in one request might take time. In order to prevent a timeout error from the webserver, it’s recommended to use async requests. This way, you will submit your requests to Outscraper and retrieve them later (usually within 1-3 minutes, depending on the number of reviews) with the Request Results endpoint.
A good practice is sending async requests and checking the results at 15-sec intervals. Check out this Python implementation if necessary.
# step 1: submit the task and get request id
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID_1&reviewsLimit=2000&sort=newest&async=true" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"
# step 2: retrieve the task results later (usually within 1-3 minutes, depends on the amount of reviews)
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/requests/REQUEST_ID"
Video Tutorial
FAQ
Most frequent questions and answers
Although, Google limits the amount of reviews you can fetch with it’s official API, you can use Google Maps reviews API provided by Outscraper to get all the reviews from any places.
Google Places API can be used for Google reviews. But there is only 5 review limit. If you want to download reviews without any limits, you can use an alternative service. Outscraper Google Maps Reviews API is one of these alternative services.
If the reviews you want to get don’t belong to your own Google Maps profile, you won’t be able to get all the reviews. You can get up to 5 reviews from other businesses. But with Outscraper Google Maps Reviews API, you can collect unlimited reviews without this limit.
Extracting data from Google with browsers has its pros and cons. Although you can develop the scraper by yourself, during scaling, it might lead to big expenses for using servers with huge amounts of CPUs in order to handle browser emulations. Additionally, there should be a person who maintains the crawler and updates it during Google site changes.
By using Outscraper Platform, API, or SDKs Outscraper provides the easiest solution for businesses and individuals to start Scraping Reviews from Google without handling proxies, browser emulation, and investing in developing.
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