TL;DR - I need help using Google Places API to download star ratings and user reviews of multiple stores and I am too dumb to figure out what I am suppose to be doing. Please help!
For the life of me, this has been hard to find any sort of useful info or documentation in terms of trying to download user ratings and star reviews from multiple locations. Just to give you a bit of info, I work for a company that has three major brands with over 500 stores across the country. We have multiple listings and our senior stakeholders are wanting to get their hands on what our customers are saying about our brand and particularly see who are top performing stores are (and who are NOT are top performers) in the form of star ratings and user reviews.
Now to get those sorts of insights is pretty easy to do for one location, but for multiple? It seems Google doesn't have that feature on hand.
According to the Google Community, I would need to use Google My Business API (see thread 1) However Google Support told me that for what I am looking to do required Google Places API. So after heading over there, I found this which makes this the most possible way I can get what I need Google Places API
Now I am stuck at the part about loading libraries. Darnit, surely there is a way I can just make an API request to get what I want, no?
I am throwing myself on the mercy of you smart people (I have the basic knowledge and I am a person who learns by doing) so your assistances will be deeply appreciated.
Using Places API web service you can get up to 5 reviews when you execute a place detail request. Rating is also available in the response.
Please have a look at the documentation:
https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/details#PlaceDetailsResults
Currently, there is no way to get more than 5 reviews in Places API. You can see a feature request in the public issue tracker, however, it looks like Google didn't set a high priority on this task:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35825957
If you are the owner of the place in Google My Business, you can use Google My Business API to retrieve a list of all reviews for your place:
https://developers.google.com/my-business/content/review-data
Hope it helps!
Related
I'm reading the documentation of GM-APIs, I found the section relative to "Places", but I can't find anything to get the information about the per-hour number of customers for a certain place.
Do you know whenever you search a place on GMaps, there is an indication of the frequency of customers, in that way you can know if the place will be busy or empty.
Is there any way to retrieve that information through Google Maps API?
Currently, there is no available feature in Google Maps API that could get the exact number or the of people in an establishment to determine its busiest time of the day.
However, there is an existing Feature Request in Google Map Platform's Public issue tracker to expose the place's popular times which seems to be related to the feature you are looking for.
Here's the link to that feature request: https://issuetracker.google.com/35827350. You can star/favorite this feature request and feel free to leave a comment there regarding your use case for additional information as well.
I am able to get restaurants list, timings, rating and displaying them in my Android application by using Google places API. This is API
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/search/json?location=13.0104611,80.2086226&
radius=10000&types=cafe|restaurant&hasNextPage=true&nextPage()=true&sensor=false&key=MY_API_KEY
As per my client requirement, Users should be able to give rating to a specific restaurant from my application, this restaurant got from above Googel API.
Kindly tell me whether possible or not giving rating to a restaurant from above API . Thanks in advance.
According to the documentation, using the Google Places API Web Service, the following place requests are available:
Place Searches return a list of places based on a user's location or search string.
Place Details requests return more detailed information about a specific Place, including user reviews.
Place Add allow you to supplement the data in Google's Places database with data from your application.
Place Photos gives you access to the millions of Place related photos stored in Google's Place database.
Place Autocomplete can be used to automatically fill in the name and/or address of a place as you type.
Query Autocomplete can be used to provide a query prediction service for text-based geographic searches, by returning suggested queries as you type.
The only request that allows to put data is Place Add, but according to the documentation it adds a place that is available immediately in Nearby Searches initiated by your application and also enters a moderation queue to be considered for Google Maps.
So the answer is that for the time being it's not possible to add reviews to Places using the Google Places API Web Service.
I need a placeID, for our business, so I can make api calls.
Business name: Maler-Teamet.dk
Address: Engkær 15, 2650 Hvidovre, Danmark
Address-placeID: ChIJCYGE6K5WUkYRVxTvbfHLWd8
I have a piece of working javascript code, that I'm using to extract reviews of another business, in a test environment, from the Google Places/Maps api, using placeID, and displaying them on a webpage.
After updating our Google myBusiness profile, with the assistance of the Google support, who actually made most of the changes. We, and Google myBusiness, are no longer able to find the business on Google Maps, and therefore retrieve a placeID.
Using normal Google search, the myBusiness profile never displays either. I'm actually really concerned how this might be affecting seo and rankings.
When including either Hvidovre or Engkær in the seach, it does display correctly, and the business profile has a map on it, that links to the business profile on maps, which seems to be registered to the city address only, Hvidovre. This doesn't get any results in placeID finder either though. But the profile is there somewhere then.
Using f.ex the Google placeID finder with our company name, returns no autocomplete, or results. If I use the address registered on our profile, I do get a placeID, but our business is not registered on that placeID, when I make api calls.
With support from Google's myBuisness department, Google has been able to identify that there is an issue, and they have reported the issue on, internally. The reference number for the case is 2-8475000011449.
They have not been able to support the part of the issue related to the Maps/Places Api, or give me a timeline for resolving the issue, since Maps is a different department/branch related to the developers console.
Since technical support through the developers console, apparently requires a premium subscription, I have attempted to contact the sales department, to confirm that I need to pay more than 400$ to report this issue, and create what they call a P1 support case, as I understand it.
Since explaining the issue in a reply, I have actually not heard from them in 4 days now. Despite numerous attempts on my behalf.
Since the only other option Google myBusiness support was able to give was, to report the issue here with the tags google-places-api and google-maps and cross my fingers, I guess I'm hoping the right persons find this.
I looked into your issue and was able to find your business place ID. The place ID related to Maler-Teamet.dk is ChIJ91ouygNUUkYRCPVhhABpMMk.
However, as I can see this place has a service area information. Please note that "Service Area Business" results do not appear in Places API. Typically, these businesses don't have an exact location, but rather their service area. That's why they are excluded from the search.
I can suggest keeping in touch with Google My Business team and changing this business to not "Service Area Business".
I am looking to find out if Google Places Autocomplete should return results including my submitted places.
I have submitted a place to the Place Report endpoint, and got an
id and ref back.
I then want my users to be able to select that
place from an autocomplete box - along with all the other results.
I have added the browser API key to the Javascript src.
Is this how it's designed to work, 'cos it's not working like that at the moment - or am I being impatient / doing something wrong.
I have verified my Place has been added by calling up the details using the reference it returned when I added it...
Your Place Reports are supposed to be available immediately to your application, but they must pass through a Google moderation process before they become generally available to all users. From the User Place Reports section of the Google Places API Docs:
Place Report requests are used to add new Places, or delete existing
ones. New Places will be available immediately in Place Searches
initiated by your application, and will enter the moderation queue to
be considered for Google Maps. A newly-added Place will not be
available to other applications until it has been approved by the
moderation process.
It isn't clear from your question exactly how you performed your Place Report, so I assumed you had used the Google Places API.
Some additional info, based on your comment:
It makes sense that you can see the place you have added using the Places API, but that it doesn't appear when using Autocomplete. The Places API is designed to be very thorough (and of course, the new place was added by your application), while the Autocomplete is focused on being high-speed, low-latency, and is based almost entirely on how Google rates the prominence of nearby places. Assuming the newly added place has not yet had many clicks, ratings, etc. on maps.google.com, it makes sense that it will not yet rate very highly in prominence.
There is some very good information about the differences between the Autocomplete tool and the general Places API in the Autocomplete Demo & Places API Demo & Discussion Video, given by Paul Saxman, a Developer Advocate at Google and Marcelo Camelo, Google's Technical Lead for the Places API. There is a portion near the end where they discuss adding new places and I think it will help clarify the results you are seeing. Anyway, I hope it helps -
The website I am working on should keep a list of many businesses located at different cities. I add those business manually into my database, and later need to display them with Google Maps using markers (so the main purpose of the map is to display a list of businesses). The map is public and no fees are charged. I am not retrieving businesses' information from Google. What I do not understand is whether I am allowed to use Google Maps to display a list of businesses or not.
I can not quite understand this point of their ToS
10.2 (b) No Business, Residential, or Telephone Listings Services. You must not display business listings Content in any Maps API Implementation that has the primary purpose of making available business, residential address, or telephone directory listings.
Does this basically say that I can implement a service to list businesses, but I cannot query Google to obtain information about other businesses and add them to my own list?
Thank you
Firstly I am not a lawyer but I have taken a good look at the Google Maps licensing and I would read it the opposite way that you have read it. I think that displaying business listings on a Google map violates their ToS.
10.2 Restrictions on the Types of Applications that You are Permitted to Build with the Maps API(s). Except as explicitly permitted in Section 8 (Licenses from Google to You) or the Maps APIs Documentation, you must not (nor may you permit anyone else to) do any of the following:
....
(b) No Business, Residential, or Telephone Listings Services. You must
not display business listings Content in any Maps API Implementation
that has the primary purpose of making available business, residential
address, or telephone directory listings.
It seems to me the criteria that is being evaluated is the type of service you are offering and if the type of offering is a business listing service (which it sounds like you service is) then you are not allowed to use the Google map API. This makes sense as it would be hard to differentiate that sort of business listing from the service that Google provide.
However, there are a number of free options you could use to put markers on maps that you should look at which avoid this issue. These include:
OpenLayers
GeoExt
PolyMaps
Leaflet
As you have created your own database I suggest you to create a web service of it and then use that data to display it on map.
Refer this link..This one is the best for your question. It explain each every steps from DB to Google Maps.
https://developers.google.com/maps/articles/phpsqlsearch_v3
Another thing which you can do is that you can upload the bulk data on Google's Places and then you can use Google's Places API to fetch the data. But one thing which you i would like to point is that if you use Places API then it will provide you maximum 20 results. Refer this links.
Bulk data upload
Hope this will help you....