I am researching whether the following is possible and if so how I could go about achieving it.
We collect reviews for businesses from their customers and we’d like to post these reviews to Google places as part of the reviews they have on their.
I was wondering how I would go about getting our website to “push” this data to the Google places website, I’ve done lots of searching on the APIs but have found nothing that says it’s possible or not.
Currently the Google Places API does not have write capability. It only has read capability. Right now only ratings are available, but I suspect reviews might come someday too.
Although you can send check-in signals and fix Places through the API. Hopefully Google will add the ability to send reviews and receive them.
If you're looking to get your content added to Google, you may want to talk to their content partnerships teams http://www.google.com/support/mapcontentpartners/
Since Google's local and maps initiatives are under the same people that would be the place to go.
I too looked into this as it would be of huge value to companies if possible.
My research led me to believe that it is not possible and could possibly violate Google's TOA with negative results for the company's Places page.
Instead, I built a workaround that makes it really easy for companies to collect feedback and get their own customers to submit the reviews: http://dallasmarketingservices.com/survey-local-unveiled-how-online-reviews-affect-your-local-business/
Maybe we will see this in the future though.
Related
I have an artist who sells his music via google play.
I want to build software that is able to fetch data that consist of number of plays, by gender, age etc.
Is this possible? Currently I have to manually log into the website in order to retrieve the information and automation would work much better for me.
I would be open to paying a fee as well.
Thanks
Such an API isn't offered right now, and to be honest it seems unlikely one will be given this page says "If you would like to make your music available for purchase/download, we recommend one of these YouTube Preferred Partners ...".
It sounds like you'd have to write some website scraping code. There are lots of questions on stackoverflow about libraries for scraping Beautiful Soup is one that is commonly recommended.
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).
I'm an intern and I've been tasked with creating a RoomFinder API for Outlook that works with Amazon's Lex/Lambda to find a location and schedule meetings given a list of participants. The API is supposed to be able to pull the calendars from Outlook for the individual participants, find a time that works for all of them and a location with a proper seating capacity, and then schedule the meeting+add it to the calendars of those involved. I have a pretty good understanding of how Lex works and have created my own functions using Lambda before but I don't even know where to begin when it comes to pulling the calendars from Outlook for the participants.
I have been trying to get an idea of how to go about this for a few days now and found some information on Outlook's REST API which it sounds like can be used to gather some of the needed information but I'm not sure how to actually begin doing that. Here are links to a few of those pages:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/api/use-outlook-rest-api#RegAuthConverged
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn643730(v=exchg.150).aspx
I also managed to find a few pages on GitHub of similar, more basic scripts using Python to acquire things like Room Availability from Outlook but I couldn't get any of those to work. I don't have enough reputation to post more links but if seeing those would help I can maybe comment them later.
I'm really looking for any advice on where to begin or tips on how to get this done. I think I may be on the right track with the REST API idea but I have no clue how to actually use it or set it up.
Any help is appreciated, thanks.
We are just now rolling out a new REST API to list the roomsIDs(findrooms). You can use this in conjunction with the findmeetingtimes API to schedule meetings. Please take a look at the REST API docs here(remember to choose beta in the top-right)
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/api/calendar-rest-operations#GetMeetingRooms
I would like to update "Opening hours" for all stores of a company in Google my business, through an automated API (a REST service for example).
My customer has hundreds of stores, and currently this is done manually.
I've read there is NO automated way to do this, a user needs to fill manually every opening hour in the google my business portal.
I can't believe that, and I'm wondering how big companies with a lot of stores take care of that problem, especially for "exceptional closings", etc.
I have already search for a long, and didn't found anything.
The only ability supplied by google is to upload a list of stores, through a file, and this file doesn't contain any information regarding opening hours (am I wrong ?).
I would like to be able to update store list AND opening hours regularly, through an API (My Business, or Places).
Does google propose a such API, or do you have any suggestion to handle this concern from a programmatical point of view ?
Thank you
There was no Google API for My Business at the time when I posted my question, but meanwhile Google has released it and also provides samples for many languages : https://developers.google.com/my-business/
Thanks to eton_ceb for the notification.
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.