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Dev builds Python scraper to track Google Hotels prices without an API key

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An 18-year-old engineering student has created a Google Hotels Scraper, available as a paid tool with a free trial on the Apify platform. Since Google offers no official API for its hotel pricing data, the scraper fetches prices by parsing embedded script blobs directly from hotel search pages over plain HTTP, requiring no headless browser. A typical query returning 50 hotels completes in under a minute and delivers structured data including nightly price, taxes, ratings, deals, and coordinates. The tool can be called via Python or Node.js using the Apify client library, and each hotel record includes a stable entity token that allows price comparisons across multiple runs over time. The developer also demonstrated a practical use case: automatically logging daily Charlotte hotel prices into a Google Sheet to track price movements over several weeks.

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