Every automation firm in India, found on a budget.
A sweep of Google Places that listed every automation firm in Mumbai and across India, paying for details only where it had to.
- Role
- Solo build, with Claude Code
- When
- Oct 2026
- Built with
- Python · Google Places API · Quadtree search · Greedy set cover · openpyxl
- Where
- AHA Smart Homes
1,176Firms in Mumbai
11,007Firms across India
6 of 13Keywords run nationally
How it helped AHA
- The whole market, not page one1,176 firms in Mumbai, 192 of them in home automation, and 11,007 more across India, where one search shows 60.
- Cheap to runA free ID-only sweep came first, so paid lookups went only to the smallest set of searches that covered every firm.
- Clean enough to useCopier dealers, software firms and estate agents are filtered out using each firm’s own website, and doubtful ones go to a review sheet.
The problem
- A Places text search returns at most 60 results, however many firms exist.
- Asking for names, websites and phones on every request would have blown the budget.
- “Automation” also finds copier dealers, RPA software firms and estate agents.
What I did
- A quadtree sweep: any square of the map that returns results splits into four, down to about 1.4 km in Mumbai. How it works →
- IDs first, details later: the sweep asks only for place IDs; a greedy set cover then buys details with the fewest paid calls, under a hard budget cap.
- Mumbai before India: six of the 13 keywords found almost everything in Mumbai, so only those six ran nationally.
- A website check: each firm’s own home page is fetched once and scored, then name rules and Google’s categories sort the rest.
Results
7,210 squares searched in Mumbai and 36,211 across India. The list itself stays internal.