Extracting Google Earth POI

I would think that you would need to select and save all the places that you want to "extract" so that they show up in your "My Places" and then save the KML.

I probably didn't explain myself properly!

If I select Florence on GE and turn all layers off except for the restaurants in points of interest, I see the points on the map - I can save this as a KML file but I don't get the restaurants listed only the map! I've looked into the kml file & there are no POIs

Yes, because if you want to "extract" the data, you have SELECT everything that you want to extract. You cannot extract an entire layer.

Think about it, the layer contains everything for the entire world, not just what you are zoomed to.

Plus the information is dynamic not static.

The only things that get saved to the KML are the things that you select and save under My Place.

OK then how do I select? For instance, again around Florence I see lots of restaurants - how do I select them - if I click on one it just shows the info for that restaurant. Am I being dumb?

I just tried something and it seems to work, try this go to google earth, enter your restarants in Florence, turn off all the layers except dining, do a search. at the top of the list is should say "resturants near florence" then save it to my places. That should move it down "Places" then find the file you just saved, then double click on it and it should open up and have about 10 places listed. Right click on it and "save places as " name it and save as a .kml i use poiedit then navigate to the file and open it, those names should show up. then you can save those as a .csv file. then i go to exel and open that file and go from there with the addresses phone numbers etc.
Hope this helps you out.

Thanks adcusnret,
I did that but as you say all you get are the 10 restaurants listed in the Florence restaurants user created poi file? (I presume this is what the search returns).

I want to try and capture the 50 or so taht are marked on the map when you first search to Florence! Are these put on the map by users or google itself?

It seems to me a good way of starting a guide to the city of visit focused on your specific areas of interest - in this case food!

Am I explaining myself?

Some are user content and some are not. You can choose whether or not you want to show the user added content by checking the box in the bottom of the search results.

You will also notice that there are page numbers for your search results. As you page through them, just right click on the top part where it reads "restaurants near florence (1 - 10), then do (11 - 20) until you get all of them saved in your My Places. You will see them listed in the window.

Then save it.

That's it - thanks guys & gals - I can eat!

It's a bit of a manual process though, pity selecting all the restaurants isn't easier!

Here's what I do - correct me if there is a shorter way - I only need a KML for iGO8

- I select first file of restaurants shown in the GE search
- save it as my place
- select the next file & repeat until finished
- I then have to go through each file saved in my places and save as KML
- I then open each one in GPS Converter and add the conetents into cumulative contents until all are done (this requires a file open, select an entry, copy all entries accross and repeat for next file)
- then I save the file as KML
- open file with notepad and change the Name from GPS Device to Florence Restaurants & remove some of the KML code which isn't needed
- Done

Phew! I need something to eat after all that expenditure of energy!

I just saw that i can speed up the process by skipping the save in my places & just saving each one directly to a KML file!

when you open the file with poiedit you can just go thru the list and delete the ones you dont want, personally i think that would be faster than doing each one by itself.

I'm not with you there, adcustnret? I want all the restaurants in Florence, unfortunately they appear in the search in blocks of 10.

i.e when I do a search for restaurants I get 10 listed and at the bottom of the search numbers 1,2,3,4............ to go to next 10. I have to save each 10 as a KML file and go to the next 10, etc. I then merge all these file into one KML file using GPS Converter

Is there a quicker way - there are pages & pages of restaurants for Florence for instance

But when you get all your places saved into one .kml file, open poi edit, navigate to that file name,click(or double click) on it and it should open up and list ALL the places, Then you can go down the list and delete the ones you dont want. Then save as a .csv

Thanks, but I wanted all of them as a kind of restaurant tourist guide for the city - I'll probably highlight some of the ones I'm most interested. What's the best way to do this?

I don't need a CSV file a KML file is fine for my iGO8 so no conversions needed!

I dont think you can really hilite them, But you could always rename them, something to your liking or Number them,(if you use numbers they will automaticaly set up speed alerts for you) unless someone else chimes in with a idea.

Put an asterisk at the beginning of the name for each restaurant you want to "highlight".

When you view the entire list of restaurants, the "highlighted" ones will stand out with the asterisk at the beginning of the name.

And you can then do a spell search for * and you will get a list of your "highlighted" restaurants sorted by distance.

Good idea GadgetGuy,
Thanks guys for all your help - still no idea how this can be done quicker/easier than my previous post, anybody?

Nope. That's the only way. Google Earth was not designed for the points of interest to be extracted in large batches.

I wonder would there be a general interest in a search facility like this or am I the only one? i.e. to be able to gather all KML files for one or multiple layers within a square bounded by latitude:longtiude co-ords? Like I'm trying to do for my travel guide to Venice, Florence & Rimini.

So in other words interacting with Google Earth to pull down all KML files for the criteria chosen above!

I'm thinking of looking into Google Earth API to try this!

What do others think - worthwhile or not?

My guess is that since this is their copyrighted data that they spend resources to compile and maintain, that they may not support scraping of the data for use outside the designated environment of Google Earth.

But I can currently save them as KML files of 10 entries in each file - it just takes a long time if there are 200 entries i.e 20 files So all I'm doing is speeding up a process which can be done currently; not getting at data which is restricted in some way!

Is this data not put up mostly by end users and therefore not Google's property?

Edit: Forgetting about anything else: is there any interest in this or am I alone?

Guess I am alone in this!

I'd love to see an API that allows batch saves of the points too. I'm at the beginning stages of a new poi and the first step is saving the nearly 1000 results coming up from the search field on GE.

10 at a time.

It would be great if there was a tool that allowed all the results of a search to be saved out to a KMZ file or even displayed all at once as temporary and then saved to My Places.

What's the use of having this huge database that is Google and not be able to plot the results in their own tool, GE?