Google Place API, advanced place details: amenities, crowd, accessibility - google-places-api

I'm successfully using Google Places API to get details like name, address, phone, lat/lng, opening hours, etc. No problem with that.
However, the data I can't get a hold of is the deeper data.
For example, if you open up a McDonald's, and click on its short description, it will show things like Amenities, Crowd, Atmosphere, Accessibility.
Question is - is it possible to access this information via Places API?
Thanks

According to the documentation. That information is not returned by the API. You can link directly to that place on Google Maps to show your users that information though.
Remember that APIs like this usually don't return all of the information available to the native service so that the native service (in this case Google Places) retains a competitive advantage.

Related

Is it possible to dynamically query Google APIs to see how much of the limit/quota you've used?

For a given Google API, is there any way to dynamically check usage against any of the current limits for that API?
For example, this page https://developers.google.com/classroom/limits?hl=en shows that I can query the Classrooms API 4,000,000 times per client per day. At midday, without going to the API Console, how could I know that I've already hit 3 million queries?
I'm hoping that there's a billing or usage API that covers this, but can't see it.
Note: I'm not having any issue right now with a specific call, just anticipating that my usage will scale up significantly in the next few months, so am looking for a solution for monitoring rather than advice on not hitting the limits at all. My specific use-case is for Google Classrooms, but reading wider around this I can't see a general solution either.
Answer:
No, dynamically you can't retrieve this information.
Feature Request:
You can however let Google know that this is a feature that is important for the Google Workspace APIs to have, and that you would like to request they implement it.
The page to file a Feature Request for the Google Classroom API is here, as there is no specific component for Google Workspace APIs in general I would suggest filing it here instead.
You can use Google's Cloud Monitoring API to achieve this. This is the documentation page for APIs-
https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/v3
This is the documentation page for concerned metrics-
https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/metrics_gcp#serviceruntime/quota/allocation/usage
https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/metrics_gcp#serviceruntime/quota/exceeded
https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/metrics_gcp#serviceruntime/quota/limit

How to get place description using Google API or any other API?

I am using Google API to get the place information and store it into database. Using Google API I am able to get address, opening hours, rating and reviews as shown in below image.
But, I am not able to get place description which is highlighted in below image in red circle. ("Quaint Italian mainstay for deep-dish, Chicago-style pizza, calzones, pastas & hot dogs.")
I want that information in my application. I think google is taking those information from
Freebase https://developers.google.com/freebase/guide/basic_concepts
Wikipedia https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute
But I am not sure.
Can any one help me suggest me that how I can get that information or any other API that I can use to get that information based on google place_id.
Any help would be highly appreciated.
Thank you
Accordingly to the documentation and #xomena, currently you cannot obtain this data via Places API. There is a feature request in Google issue tracker to make the detailed business type available in Places API, however Google doesn't expose any ETA (estimation time of arrival:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35822953
Feel free to star this feature request to express your interest and subscribe to notification from Google.
To my knowledge it is not possible to get this information from the Google Places API. The API documentation does not display the venue description. Try to have a look here: https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/details (it might be that Google does not share all information from their platform with other developers..).
I would suggest you to do one of the following (or perhaps both):
Scrape Google the old school way; i.e. by getting the information from the HTML. There is a quite decent guide for doing that here (you would of course have to adjust the example to scraping Google instead): https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-scrape-websites-with-python-and-beautifulsoup-5946935d93fe.
What I would recommend and which probably is the fastest: enrich your current data with other data. You could e.g. use Foursquare and search for the places you get from Google. It should be possible to get the description for each place on Foursquare. See here: https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/api/venues/details. If you have problems with matching the places after your query has returned, because the venue names are not exactly the same - but close, then you could use an algorithm to match strings that are close; perhaps using the levenstein distance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance).

Yahoo, Google, Yelp API

Is there any php API to gather information about a business(address, reviews) by its phone number from Yelp, Google, Insiderpages, Yahoo..
Please help, i have done research about these, but did't get the right info, though yelp is providing info by it's phone number but there they ask ywsid as mendatory (http://api.yelp.com/phone_search?phone=1234567890&ywsid=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX) but i want by phone number only.
Please note that all APIs have terms, most of them won't allow you to store their data in your own database and most of them have display requirements, before proceeding with any developing please read carefully their display requirements and terms.
Depending on your project you might not be allowed to use the data as you might need/want to on your project.
The other alternative would be scrapping sites, but most sites have rules against scraping too...
And again read a lot before putting too effort on something you are prohibited to in first place.
Yelp
ywsid = API key, you need to get your own key if you are using the yelp API, get it here
if you are using it to add it to your own database or storing the information anywhere it is against their policies display requirements & api terms.
if you are using any API you must read their terms before even thinking of doing anything.
Google Places
API
Insiderpages
I Don't think they have one but you could use the citygrid API that does a [lot of sites] search at once.
Yahoo
Yahoo API
CityGrid
As mentioned before citygrid API
Foursquare
Foursquare API
Merchant Circle
Merchant Circle API
White Pages
White Pages API
Yellow Pages
Yellow Pages API
Bottom line is, all these companies have put a lot of time and effort and money to build their databases, and they want you to redirect people back to their pages so they can make their money back/profit.

Use Google Places API to autocomplete input in subscribe form

For a commercial website, I would like users to fill out a field with their shop name, and if the shop is found by google, fill out the subscription form (for example: phone number, address, logo, etc).
My question: is it possible to use this Api with that? I find that the terms of use are not clear.
PS : Sorry about my english :/
In short a few of the important terms of use are:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html#section_9_1
You must not charge access to use your implementation of the Places Autocomplete API and it must be freely accessible to the public. Unless its part of a Mobile Application or you have a Google Enterprise agreement or obtained Google's written permission.
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/autocomplete.html#requirements
You must show a "Powered by Google" logo with any data accessed using the Places Autocomplete API if you do no show this data with a Google Map
If the Places Autocomplete API responses contains Listing provider information it must be displayed to the user.
If your implementation adheres to the terms of use, than it is possible for you to use the Places Autocomplete API for the purpose described.

How can i get list of domain users from Google Apps account without administrative access?

This is a similar question to How can i get list of Domain user's from Google Apps account?
However, I'd like to use a normal account (not an administrative account) to retrieve the user list. It seems like this should be possible as the gmail autocomplete returns domain contacts not listed in the user's contact store. I've looked at the autocomplete Ajax call, but it requires something in the beginning of the string (and no, I don't really want to loop through a-z one by one - that is just way to hacky). For example:
https://mail.google.com/mail/c/u/0/data/contactstore?ac=true&ct=true&gp=true&hl=en&id=domain&max=15&out=js&tok=beginningOfUsersName&type=4
Both versions of the Google contacts API seem to omit domain users unless you have them imported into your own contacts list. I've also looked at querying users in the "Coworkers" system group, all to no avail. I also find it interesting that "add a coworker's calendar" on Google calendar does not provide autocomplete - they use a popup instead.
I'm working on a C# project, but this is a general Google API question, so any pointers in any language would help.
Update
It looks like this is feasible now with admin/directory google api endpoints
see: https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/directory/v1/guides/manage-users?authuser=0#retrieve_users_non_admin
Original answer
I was able to work around this issue, so I'll document the workaround, even if it doesn't involve Google. I wrote a program (in C#) to query the internal Active Directory (LDAP) store and pick up all the users from there instead. At that point I could get their email addresses and query Google with it. Not the best method, but it worked for my needs.
The C# was roughly patterned from this powershell script, although I pulled out the computers query and added in the capture of the user's email address: http://www.visualbasicscript.com/List-all-users-or-computers-in-the-default-domain-m35650.aspx
The LDAP property I included to get the proper email address for Google was 'proxyAddresses', although this will not be correct for all environments.

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