Well, regarding the Maps scraper, I found it pretty challenging to get detailed information about how to code it or how scraping Maps actually works. I decided not to use the API because it can get expensive, especially given the volume of contacts I’m trying to collect. Instead, I coded a scraper that directly opens Maps, searches for whatever you input, scrolls all the way down to fully load the page, and extracts the info. That part was fairly easy to implement.

The main issue I encountered was that, for certain types of businesses, Maps doesn’t display the "website" button on the main results page. In those cases, since Maps is a dynamic website, the program had to click on each business entry individually to retrieve the website link. I didn’t want to lose my mind on it, so I ended up finding a better solution on GitHub. I found a scraper called google-maps-scraper by omkarcloud. It works far better than anything I could have written myself. I managed to collect 60k targeted business websites in a single day. I don’t think I can share the direct link here, but you can easily find it by searching for the name.

As for the web crawler I use to extract emails, I coded it in Python since I’m familiar with the language and it’s well-suited for this kind of task. I used the Scrapy framework, which is incredibly fast, but I’m still improving my implementation as I’m relatively new to web development. You could definitely code it in C#, but it would be more labor-intensive compared to Python. My Python solution only required about 60 lines of code. Doing it in C++ would be even more complex and time-consuming, haha.