How to Extract Google Maps Coordinates

Have you ever thought you can make money by knowing how many restaurants there are in a square mile? There is no free lunch, however, if you know how to use Google Maps, you can extract and collect the restaurant’s GPS and store them in your own database. With that information on hand and some math calculations, you are off to creating a big data online service.

In this article, I will show you how to quickly extract Google Maps coordinates with a simple and easy method.

You may check out this YouTube video first.

It is tricky to notice that the coordinates actually are hidden inside the URLs. In this case, we need to extract the URL, and use Regular Expression to find the exact matching text string we are looking for. Let’s take the Space Needle landmark in Seattle as an example.

First, Open Google Maps in your browser and type Space Needle in the search bar

After the page finishes loading, look for coordinates in the URL. The coordinates are located behind the “@” sign.