I've been running into some location based searches using the Google Maps API (more of a structural issue on my end than any criticism of the mapping api)
For example, if a user searches for "Victoria, Canada" it will bring up results for "Victoria, Canada" as expected. However, if a user searches for "Canada," google returns a longitude and latitude for the middle of the country, which is essential for correctly centering the map. However, it will not display any results since the nearest location is too far away from the location returned by google. I'm filtering out results that are about 20 miles away.
Can the Google Maps API return anything that I could use to tell if a user has entered a state or country name? If not, has anyone developed a work around solution?
Ideally, I would like to avoid just ordering the results by nearest location. I don't want items for "Spain" showing up at the bottom of a list when a user searches for "United States." I would try to determine if the query is a state or country prior to the search, but this seems very daunting task given the different possible spelling of country and region names. If I was only expecting english spellings, it would be a much easier approach.
Assuming this is a form on a site that has a controller parse the form and send the request to Google's API, you could break the form out into address, city, state, and country (if needed) form elements then make the address and city required fields.
I'm doing a similar approach with a site I'm building using Google Places API and it seems to work for me.
Related
This is more of a general programming question.
I'm trying to create an app, think of it as a Yelp clone. I have most of it working but I'm missing one important feature. The data of the places around me. For now I'm only focused on food, so I'd like it if I search something like "Pizza", it'd show me all the pizza joints near me.
I was originally planning to use Google Places API. However if you havent heard, they're changing their pricing and lowering the free tier and upping the cost by a huge margin.
There's also the problem of saving the data. One workaround I saw a user suggest was to just keep using Google's API, but every time you make the query, store the data in your own DB as well (I only need address and name and latitude and longitude) so eventually, you'd have what you need in a sense. However I also want to have something like a simple rating system for each place like Yelp, but Google (and all other places like MapBox, Here Maps, etc) states something along the lines of "info from their API should not be stored or cached for more than 24hrs" but it's very broad and not specific.
So what I was planning to do was, call the Google API, grab the 3 info I need (Address, Name, Lat/Lng), add more fields to store the rating, likes, whatever else the user will add. Then store it in my database, but that doesn't seem like a solution now.
So does anyone have any ideas or advice? Or know of a service where I can get the details of all the food places? And if possible, can anyone confirm that storing the Name, Address, Lat&Lng is a violation of their policy since in my eyes, it's public data, but something like the rating that Google provides, or the pictures that Google provides, now that's Google property.
For obtaining places you can use OpenStreetMap, e.g. using Overpass API. Since larger traffic can be expected you should run your own database(s) instead of using the public APIs.
However OSM doesn't contain ratings. So you have to combine this data with some other publicly available rating system.
I would like to return specific places (stores like Target, Macy's, etc.) by location (latitude, longitude).
I have been using the google places api and entering the different stores in the name parameter. The results are inconsistent at best.
Is this the api I should be using to return specific stores by name and proximity? The google places api near by search has only a single name parameter. I would ideally like to search for several specific stores in a single request to the endpoint for performance reasons.
In conclusion
What api should I be using to return specific stores by name and proximity?
The Google Places API is the correct Google API to use; however, as you mentioned it does not support multiple name or keyword parameters. There is an active Places API - Feature Request for this here, please star it if you wish to see it resolved and to be notified of future changes.
Instead of using the name parameter, try using the keyword parameter. The keyword parameter is matched against all available fields, including but not limited to name, type, and address, as well as customer reviews and other third-party content. This can often yield more or better results.
It seems as if the foursquare api does let you search for multiple specific places.
Here is an example url that does the trick:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?ll=34.017717,-118.159335&query=Target Victoria's Secret Macy's &intent=browse&radius=16094&oauth_token=mytoken
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So I'm abandoning Google Places and going with FourSquare.
I recently joined a team working on an application that maintains listings with addresses. The user searches, and includes their zipcode, and the application displays the distance to each listing. Currently we use the Google Maps API for this. Reading through questions here on StackOverflow seem to suggest that this is the best way of doing things:
php/mysql zip code proximity search
Search engine by distance
However, while reading through the API documentation, this seems to be expressly forbidden unless we also show a map for each result (and possibly also for each result we filter out, depending on how you read the following statement):
Use of the Distance Matrix API must relate to the display of information on a Google Map; for example, to determine origin-destination pairs that fall within a specific driving time from one another, before requesting and displaying those destinations on a map. Use of the service in an application that doesn't display a Google map is prohibited.
( https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distancematrix/ )
What's the best way to accomplish this without running afoul of any API terms?
do you consider the Geo::PostalCode module (perl)? It uses maxmind database to calculate distances between locations (and there is bind in different languages).
Can someone tell me how to get a list of suburbs by city (name,id,whatever) in OpenStreetMap API? I can't find any detailed documentation and the API is pretty abstract.
I'm looking at extended API, Xapi. I found how I can get nods and filter only suburbs, but I don't know how to set the city value.
http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.6/node[place=suburb]
Any other way or API is welcomed. Looked at geonames and google maps, but haven't found what I'm looking for. I need a list of all suburbs in Zagreb/Croatia and a way to check if a specific street is in that suburb. OSM has a pretty good and accurate data as I can see, but I'm having troubles with this API.
Have you tried setting the bounding box and then filtering the results to ensure that they are actually within Zagreb?
Here's a URL using a bounding box created on openstreetmap.org
http://open.mapquestapi.com/xapi/api/0.6/node[place=suburb][bbox=15.807,45.761,16.18,45.875]
This gives you names, but since I'm still new to OSM, I'm not quite sure how you establish their admin level and whether they actually lie within Zagreb or just within that bounding box. There may be further requests that could establish this info.
For your purposes I would use OSM Server Side Script
here is the documentation
I'm trying to find out if there is a programmatic way to determine how far down in a search engine's search results my site shows up for given keywords. For example, my query would provide my domain name, and keywords, and the result would return a say 94 indicating that my site was the 94th result. I'm specifically interested in how to do this with google but also interested in Bing and Yahoo.
No.
There is no programmatic access to such data. People generally roll out their own version of such trackers. Get the Google search page and use regexes to find your position. But now different results are show in different geographies and results are personalize.
gl=us parameter will help you getting results from US, you can change geography accordingly to get the results.
Before creating this from scratch, you may want to save yourself some time (and money) by using a service that does exactly that [and more]: Ginzametrics.
They have a free plan (so you can test if it fits your requirements and check if it's really worth creating your own tool), an API and can even import data from Google Analytics.