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Jaybird180

Jaybird180

Final Approach
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Dec 28, 2010
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Jaybird180
I'm creating a list of businesses that serve a specific market for a focus group I'm creating. At this stage, I just plugged in a search term and got the hits of all businesses that match that criteria in a certain geographic area from Google Maps; so far so good. Except, it's taking me a long time to copy-paste the results into my spreadsheet and I'm not collecting all of the information that I probably should collect.

I was wondering if there's a way to pipe the search results into a .csv or .xls format for better sorting and management?

If anyone has a suggesting, I'd love to hear. Thank you.
 
Ok, the proper way is to probably use the google places API, but here's a quicky.

Rather than using GoogleMaps, fire up google earth and do your search.
It will then list all the search results on the left side bar. At the bottom of that list is a couple of icons, the center (when you hover over it) says Copy Serach Results to Clipboard as XML. Click that.

Now open your favorite text editor and paste the clipboard into a file and save it out as SOMETHING.XML.

Go into excel, click on the DATA tab in the ribbon. Then select GET EXTERNAL DATA FROM OTHER SOURCES (fourth icon from the right on mine). Select the file you created above. Just click OK Or CONTINUE when it gripes about whatever. It will give you the data in the worksheet.
 
Since I wrote that, there's another slightly faster GE hack....

Delete everything in "My Places" (not strictly required) but it makes it easier.
Use the left most button at the bottom of the search panel to "Add to My Places."
Then export My Places as KML by right clicking on it and selecting export...

Then follow the instructions above on how to import into excel.
 
I thought I could do this at work, but no joy. I'll try it tonight. Thank you Ron.
 
I installed GE-Pro. I'll have to read the instructions in the morning, the results are not what I expected, but does appear promising.
 
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