I created a simple webscraper with Goutte to grab some movie showtimes for some application. I use this king of URL, for instance : http://www.google.fr/movies?view=list&date=3&tid=4f451a87a71bfa51.
The code isn’t working on my production server, and I finally noticed that Google Movies won’t show the results depending on the requester location. The theatre is in France, and it’s obviously working from this country, and from Germany too as far I can see, but not from Netherlands, which is my production server location.
Has anybody encountered a problem like this one? I think I could resolve this with a proxy, but it seems a little complicated (do I have to set up a new server in France just for this purpose?); maybe there’s a way to tweak the HTTP request made to Google Movies?
Thanks in advance.
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Answer
Okaaay, I found it. The trick is to add a “near” param in the querystring, with a country or region name. Seems that the “tid” isn’t enough to identify the theatre.
Hope this will help someone.