Find Nearby Businesses And Points Of Interest With Google Places

Plenty of businesses need to answer one simple question over and over: what is near this spot? A delivery service wants the restaurants within a few blocks of a customer. A travel site wants the museums and hotels around a landmark. A sign-up form wants to finish typing an address for the customer. Google Places answers that question, and it does it through an API, which means your website, your app or an AI assistant can ask it directly and get back clean, formatted data about places without anyone searching a map by hand.

What Google Places does

Google Places is the location data service from Google. It takes a request over the web and returns formatted information and imagery about businesses, geographic locations and well-known points of interest. It covers nearby search, text search, place details, place photos and autocomplete. “Points of interest” is just the industry term for places people care about: shops, restaurants, parks, landmarks.

What you can get done

Places & Points of Interest

This is the whole job: finding places, filling in the details, and showing what they look like. A store locator, a “restaurants near you” list or an address box that finishes itself are all built from these few calls.

• POST /v1/places:searchNearby finds places around a location, such as every cafe within walking distance.
• POST /v1/places:searchText finds places from a plain search phrase, like “pizza in Portland”.
• POST /v1/places:autocomplete suggests places as someone types, so forms fill in faster and with fewer mistakes.
• GET /v1/places/{placesId} gets the details for one place once you know which one you want.
• GET /v1/places/{placesId}/photos/{photosId}/media gets a photo of a place to show alongside it.

The pattern most businesses follow is search first, then details, then a photo. A customer types a few letters, autocomplete offers matches, they pick one, and you pull the details and an image to put on the page.

Getting started

Google Places is a paid, hosted service you call over the web, with self-serve signup. Usage is billed per request; for example, Google lists autocomplete requests at the Essentials level at $2.83 per 1000 events, and the full picture is in the pricing section of its APIs.io profile. Start with the Places API web service documentation, then look over the Google Places API on APIs.io to see every operation in one place.

If you have ever copied addresses out of a map into a spreadsheet, try one nearby search for your own neighborhood and see how much of that work goes away.