Google Places API inconsistency - google-places-api

Adding expected types parameter changes response result in unexpected way.
Request 1: https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/search/json?location=38.4551,-122.672045&radius=100&sensor=false&key=
Request 2: https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/search/json?location=38.4551,-122.672045&radius=100&sensor=false&types=park&key=
Both requests should return place with name: "Howarth Park" since it is of a type park. And the funny thing is that increasing radius=500 will bring back the expected result. But then how come it is returning it in the first place with no types parameter and the same radius?

This is due to the way the Google Places API processes Search Requests.
The Places API will return up to 20 establishment results within the specified radius. Additionally, area identity results may be returned to to help identify the area the establishments are located.
If no type has been specified in the Places API Search Request, these area identity results are not strictly limited to the radius specified in the request, however when a type has been specified, additional area identity results are strictly limited to the radius specified in the request.

Related

Call search scroll API with SAME scroll_id, but response parameter `hits.total.vaule` changes

I am suffering this strange behaviour of ES.
Call scroll search API with SAME scroll_id from many times.
Mostly, the parameter in response named hits.total.value keeps unchanged.
But some time, this parameter changed between 2 sequence API calls.
Of course, SMAE scroll_id are passed with these 2 API call.
Is there any possible situations which would lead to this behaviour?

Properly way for obtaining the N latest videos of channel : search vs playlistItem vs activities endpoints

I'm developing for a web app that needs to retrieve the last 10 videos of a user(channel).
First approach
Was to use the search endpoint with param 'forMine' ordering by date, but then I figured that maybe that param could retrieve videos uploaded by the user in a diferent channel or whatever...
First result with channel ID and date - 1st Aproach
Second approach
Was to use the search endpoint with param 'channelId' ordering by date, but then I realized that descriptions were incomplete and most importantly there were some videos missing comparing with first aproach, even if the missing videos belonged to same channel (as showed in pics links)
First resutl with channel ID and date - 2nd Aproach
So, then I googled to find some solution and found other way.
Third approach
Was to use the playlistItem endpoint as I found in Google, and seemed ok (I supposed) because it returned same videos that first aproach and consumed less quota but this method left me with doubts as I didn't knew if the videos would be the latest or maybe they would be sorted by position in the playlist and couldn't be trusted to be the most recent
That said, what would be the correct way to get the N most recent videos from a channel, please?
Regardless of the quota consumption (the less quota the better, of course, but an accurate result is essential)
I'm so confussed with the API response...
Thank you so much!
-- EDITED: NEW APPROACH AND FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS --
Fourth approach
Was to use activities endpoint as was stated by #stvar in his answer. I found that this way, as on second approach, there were some videos missing comparing with first and third approaches, and it was required to retrieve everything without 'maxResults' param because there were activities not related to video upload, making mandatory to perform pagination and a self filtering by type 'upload' after retrieving response in order to get N videos (or be confident in getting N videos uploaded in first 50 retrieved items)
Self Investigations
Further investigations and tests bringed me response to the issue of 'missing videos' of some approaches.
The status of that missing videos were 'unlisted', so they were videos uploaded to the channel, property of the channel, uploaded by user of the channel... but not retrieved by some methods that seemed to retrieve only 'public' videos not 'unlisted' (hidden) nor 'private'.
NOTE: I did my test with Google API PHP Client Library, this behaviour seems not to be on 'Try this API' as it returns only 'public' items, so be careful on trust in 'Try this API' results as it seems to use some hidden filters or something...
Also I tested the channel upload playlist to verify that the order can not be changed and has a LIFO sorting
CONCLUSIONS
At this point, my self conclusion is that there is not a proper way to solve this but quite ways to do it in depend of requisites of status and amount of free quota
Search endpoint seems to work all right, if you have a good amount of unused quota (100 each call) that is the direct way and easiest one as you can sort it and filtering as needed by a bunch of params, taking care to use 'forMine' param if you need every uploaded video or 'channelId' if you need only 'listed' and 'public' ones.
PlaylistItems endpoint is a proper way if you are in a quota crisis (1 each call) as the result is sorted by recent date, taking care to do pagination and post filtering if only 'public' videos are needed till retrieve the desired amount of video ids, otherwhise you can go all the way easy.
Note that the date used to order is the upload date not the post date
(thanks to #stvar for bringing this to the attention)
Activity endpoint, also for quota crisis (1 each call), while it could be more accurate than the others if you only want public videos (it is ordered by recent 'first publish date' so not accurate 100% neither ), is for me the one that gives more work, as it retrieves activities other than 'video upload', so you can not skip pagination and post filtering to retrieve the desired amount of video ids, besides that way you only have access, as said before, to public videos (which is fine if that meets your needs).
Anyway, if you need more than 50 ids, you need to make pagination whatever the aproach you use.
Hope this help someone else and thanks so much to contributors
PS: People in charge of the YouTube API, perhaps a filter by state among some others would be interesting, Thanks!!!
You may employ the Activities.list API endpoint, queried with:
mine=true,
part=snippet,contentDetails,
fields=items(snippet(type),contentDetails(upload)), and
maxResults=50.
For to obtain your desired N uploads, you have to implement pagination. That is that you have to successively call the endpoint until you reach N result set items that have snippet.type equal with upload.
Note that you may well use channelId=CHANNEL_ID instead of mine=true, if you're interested about the most recent uploads of a channel identified by its ID CHANNEL_ID rather than your own channel.
According to the docs, you'll get from this endpoint a result set made of Activities resource items that will contain the following info:
contentDetails.upload (object)
The upload object contains information about the uploaded video. This property is only present if the snippet.type is upload.
contentDetails.upload.videoId (string)
The ID that YouTube uses to uniquely identify the uploaded video.
The official docs state that each call to Activities.list endpoint has a quota cost of one unit.
Futhermore, upon obtaining a set of video IDs, you may invoke the Videos.list endpoint with a properly assigned id parameter, for to obtain from the endpoint all the details you need for each and every video of your interest.
Note that if you have a set of video IDs of cardinality K, since the parameter id of Videos.list endpoint can be specified as a comma-separated list of video IDs, then you may reduce the number of calls to Videos.list endpoint from K to floor(K / 50) + (K % 50 ? 1 : 0) by appropriately using the feature of id just mentioned.
According to the official docs, each call to Videos.list endpoint has also a quota cost of one unit.
Clarifications upon OP's request:
Question no. 1: The Activities.list endpoint produces only the activities specified by the Activities resource. The type property enumerates them all:
snippet.type (string)
The type of activity that the resource describes.
Valid values for this property are: channelItem, comment (not currently returned), favorite, like, playlistItem, promotedItem, recommendation, social, subscription, upload, bulletin (deprecated).
Indeed your remark is correct. For example, when getting the most recent 10 uploads, is possible that you'll have to scan a number of pages P of result sets, with P >= 2, until you reached collecting the desired 10 upload items. (Actual tests have confirmed me this to be factual.)
Question no. 2: The Activities.list endpoint produces items that are sorted by publishedAt; just replace the above fields with:
fields=items(snippet(type,publishedAt),contentDetails(upload))
and see that for yourself.
I could make here the following argument justifying the necessity that the items resulted upon the invocation of Activities.list endpoint be ordered chronologically by publishedAt (the newest first). One may note that, indeed, the official docs quoted above do not specify explicitly that ordering condition I just mentioned; but bare with me for a while:
My argument is of a pragmatic kind: if the result set of Activities.list is not ordered as mentioned, then this endpoint becomes useless. This is so, since, in this case, for one to obtain the most recent upload activity would have to fetch locally all the upload activities, for to then scan that result set for the most recent one. Being compelled to fetch all upload activities only for to obtain the newest one is pragmatically a nonsense. Therefore, by way of contradiction, the result set has to be ordered chronologically by publishedAt with the newest being the first.
Question no. 3: Indeed Search.list is not precise -- it has a fuzzy behavior. I can confirm this based on my own experience; but, unfortunately, I cannot point you to official docs (from Google or YouTube) that acknowledge and explain this behavior. As unfortunate as it is, for its users Search.list is completely opaque.
On the other hand, Activities.list is precise -- it has to be like that; if it wouldn't be precise, then that's a serious bug in the implementation (in my educated opinion).

What's the expected behavior of the Bing Search API v5 when deeply paginating?

I perform a bing API search for webpages and the query cameras.
The first "page" of results (offset=0, count=50) returns 49 actual results. It also returns a totalEstimatedMatches of 114000000 -- 114 million. Neat, that's a lot of results.
The second "page" of results (offset=49, count=50) performs similarly...
...until I reach page 7 (offset=314, count=50). Suddenly totalEstimatedMatches is 544.
And the actual count of results returned per-page trails off precipitously from there. In fact, over 43 "pages" of results, I get 413 actual results, of which only 311 have unique URLs.
This appears to happen for any query after a small number of pages.
Is this expected behavior? There's no hint from the API documentation that exhaustive pagination should lead to this behavior... but there you have it.
Here's a screenshot:
Each time the API is called, the search API obtains a group of possible matches starting at in the result set, and then filters out the results based on different parameters (e.g spam, duplicates, safesearch setting, etc), finally leaving a final result set.  If the final result after filtering and optimization is more than the count parameter then the number of results equal to count would be returned. If the parameter is more than the final result set count then the final result set is returned which will be less than the count parameter.  If the search API is called again, passing in the offset parameter to get the next set of results, then the filtering process happens again on the next set of results which means it may also be less than count.
 
You should not expect the full count parameter number of results to always be returned for each API call.  If further search results beyond the number returned are required then the query should be called again, passing in the offset parameter with a value equal to the number of results returned in the previous API call.  This also means that when making subsequent API calls, the offset parameter should never be a hard coded value and should always be calculated based on the results of previous queries. 
 
totalEstimatedMatches can also add to confusion around the Bing Search API results.  The word ‘estimated’ is important because the number is an estimation based on an initial quick result set, prior to the filtering described above.  Additionally, the totalEstimatedMatches value can change as you iterate through the result set by making subsequent API calls with increasing offset values.  The totalEstimatedMatches should only be used as a rough guide indicating the magnitude of the possible result set, and it should not be used to determine the number of results that will ultimately be returned.  To query all of the possible results you should continue making API calls, passing in offset with a value of the sum of the results returned in previous calls, until that sum is greater than totalEstimatedMatches of the most recent API call.
 
Note that you can see this same behavior by going to bing.com directly and using a query such as https://www.bing.com/search?q=bill+gates&count=50.  Notice that you will get around 34 results with a totalEstimatedMatches of ~567,000 (valid as of June 2017, future searches may change), and if you click the 'next page' arrow you will see that the next query executed will start at the offset of the 34 returned in the first query (ie. https://www.bing.com/search?q=bill+gates&count=50&first=34).  If you click ‘next’ several more times you may see the totalEstimatedMatches also change from page to page.
This seems to be expected behavior. The Web Search API is not a crawler API, thus it only delivers results, that the algorithms deem relevant for a human. Simply put, most humans won't skim through more than a few pages of results, furthermore they expect to find relevant results on the first page.
If you could retrieve the results in the millions, you could simply copy their search index and Bing would be out of business.
Search indices seem to be things of political and economic power, as far as I know there are only four relevant search indices world wide: from Google, from Microsoft (Bing), from Russia, and from China.
Those who control the search, control the Spice... ;-)

why Loadrunner Correlation is getting failed

I want to correlate this 181-418-5889 in the following statement: regSend&transferNumber=181-418-5889".
I used the regular web_reg_save_param: But it failed... any suggestion?
You are using the statement in the wrong location, such as using it just before the request is sent containing the correlated value versus just before the location where the response containing the value is sent to the client
You are not receiving the correct page response and as a result you may not be able to collect the value. The page may be an HTTP 200 page but the content could be completely off. Always check for an appropriate expected result
Your left boundary, right boundary and other parameters are incorrect to collect the value you need
You have not been through training and you are being forced by your management to learn this tool via trial and error
1- I am not using the statement in the wrong location since I did find the needed value I want to correlate via the Tree function and put it just before the statement that hold this value
2- The Page is not an HTTP 200
3- The Left and right boundary are correct since I checked the text if it does exist twice in the response body.
4- I know the tool (Loadrunner) but in fact, the application is developed under ZK platform and I am not sure if ZK and Loadrunner are compatible knowing that I did implement the dtid function in my script to have a static desktop id each time I replay the process.

Bing Maps API inconsistently fails on certain postal code lookups

I have an application using Bing Maps API to retrieve coordinates for a postal code and then I perform spatial queries based on the result. There are times where I get empty results, but when I wait a few minutes it succeeds. I added logic that retried a handful of times if there's a failure but that doesn't seem to be helping. Here's the empty result I get back:
{"authenticationResultCode":"ValidCredentials","brandLogoUri":"http://dev.virtualearth.net/Branding/logo_powered_by.png","copyright":"Copyright © 2014 Microsoft and its suppliers. All rights reserved. This API cannot be accessed and the content and any results may not be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner without express written permission from Microsoft Corporation.","resourceSets":[{"estimatedTotal":0,"resources":[]}],"statusCode":200,"statusDescription":"OK","traceId":"7a6bfca3f89b4f94a4693a410da4feb7|CH10043840|02.00.107.2300|CH1SCH050102529"}
And here's the URL I'm calling:
http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations?q=50613&o=json&key=MyApiKey
Is there a way I can retrieve further information based on the traceId? Or is this something that's just accepted when using Bing Maps API?
You should firstly check the number of requests you're doing in a specific time and put it in relation with the type of Bing Maps Key you're using. Basic keys are rate limited which means that if you exceed the allowed number of request in a specific duration, you will be blocked.
Bing Maps Trial and basic key and rate limitation information
Those types of key are rate limited for security and logicial reasons (on 24h period and with time between the request) and that's the reason why you're getting a blank response without any information regarding the fact that it failed to geocode.
See the Terms of Use regarding the limitations and other restrictions (load and stress tests as well as hammering are part of it): http://www.microsoft.com/maps/product/terms.html
So, in order to try to analyze where your problem comes from, you might:
Check the type of key you're using and how many calls you're making on a specific period
Check the header of the response, it should include a specific header value: X-MS-BM-WS-INFO set to 1 if you are rate limited
See the MSDN about error handling: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff701703.aspx
If you're not in this case (if you have an enterprise account), reach the technical support so they can officialy get back to you and check the key.

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