This is what I want to do. Google has a database with businesses information tied to a gps location. Is there a way to access this data (while not being employed by google)??<p>Thanks HN.
Essentially you're asking if it is possible to scrape google maps.<p>I'd start with analyzing the javascript code that creates the map view, it has to have some way of retrieving the info layer given a map coordinate.<p>After that you can try to see if you can access that information without going through the browser.<p>There are commercial vendors of such information too.
Google gets much of their data from Tele Atlas (now TomTom): www.teleatlas.com. The other big player in geo data is NavTeq: www.navteq.com. I think there are some crowd-sourced public geo databases as well.