places search behavior

[uberpowergeek]

I'm noticing that in the brightkite iPhone client and on the web we
get an "other places" powered by google (google places?) but via the
place search API these results are not showing up. Is this by design?

[LJHarb]

This was by design while we worked out some of the complexities in the
Google Place API Terms of Service. However, we're not prepared to
document this parameter.

The API documentation will be updated shortly to reflect the addition
of the parameter "dataprovider" (which defaults to 'automatic') - if
you set it to 'google' it will return Google Maps search results.
'automatic' will return Brightkite results, but if none exist, it
should return Google results.

Please note: the Google Maps API Terms of Service requires you to
display Google results separately, and to include the phrase "powered
by Google" - please look to our website and official clients for
examples. Also see http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html

- Jordan

[Benjamin Floering]

Oh wow, so after this change are you recommending that we use the default dataprovider of google?  If I wanted to search the brightkite database would the correct way to do things is to search twice, once for each dataprovider? 

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[LJHarb]

No, absolutely not!!!! The default data provider is "automatic" which
prioritizes Brightkite's database.

Please ALWAYS prioritize the default search results, as these are
places in our database instead of Google's. The Google option is there
to supplement our database.

The correct way to do it is indeed to search twice - once without a
dataprovider (which is the "automatic" option), and once with
dataprovider=google. This is how all of our clients, including the web
site, does Place search.

- Jordan

On Aug 30, 2:19 pm, Benjamin Floering <benfloer...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh wow, so after this change are you recommending that we use the default
> dataprovider of google?  If I wanted to search the brightkite database would
> the correct way to do things is to search twice, once for each
> dataprovider?
>
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:18 AM, LJHarb <jor...@brightkite.com> wrote:
> > This was by design while we worked out some of the complexities in the
> > Google Place API Terms of Service. However, we're not prepared to
> > document this parameter.
>
> > The API documentation will be updated shortly to reflect the addition
> > of the parameter "dataprovider" (which defaults to 'automatic') - if
> > you set it to 'google' it will return Google Maps search results.
> > 'automatic' will return Brightkite results, but if none exist, it
> > should return Google results.
>
> > Please note: the Google Maps API Terms of Service requires you to
> > display Google results separately, and to include the phrase "powered
> > by Google" - please look to our website and official clients for

> > examples. Also seehttp://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html

>
> > - Jordan
>
> > On Aug 30, 4:39 am, uberpowergeek <benfloer...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I'm noticing that in the brightkite iPhone client and on the web we
> > > get an "other places" powered by google (google places?) but via the
> > > place search API these results are not showing up.  Is this by design?
>
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> > brightkite-ap...@googlegroups.com<brightkite-api%2Bunsubscribe@go oglegroups.com>
> > .

[Chris Hallgren]

Thanks I didn't know this at all when I implemented it into myKite.

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[Chris Hallgren]

Would there be anyway to make this 1 call maybe dataprovider=both. Since not all clients are using 3G or EDGE and doing mutliple calls for the same results seems redundant. 

[Benjamin Floering]

Got it.  I mistook your statement "but if none exist, it should return Google results" as meaning that if no parameters exist, not no search results exist. 

Right now it seems that if no search results exist it defaults to just returning the closest locations at the lat/lng (basically disregarding the q parameter).  You are saying that this will change to fall back to a google places search, correct?  How do we know if a dataprovider=automatic was a google or brightkite search therefore requiring us to display the 'powered by Google' text?  I suppose you will provide this in the XML result somewhere?

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[LJHarb]

Unfortunately due to Google's TOS requirements, this is not possible.

I suppose you could use a third-party service like Yahoo Pipes to
combine the queries - but we aren't able to endorse or encourage such
attempts.

Since adding places will be fixed shortly, ideally if a place didn't
exist in our own database, the user would add it themselves, removing
the need to query Google.

- Jordan

[LJHarb]

Hi Ben:

Nothing is actually changing with the way place results are returned -
I'm just documenting the ability to return Google places.

Each Place object will have a URL property - if it contains
"google.com" then it's a Google result. That's the only differentiator
right now.

- Jordan

[Benjamin Floering]

Cool, looks like it is working.  One thing that I'm noticing is that if you specify a limit > 32 for dataprovider=google you get nothing.  limit of 32 or less works though. 

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[LJHarb]

Good catch, Ben!

I'll update the API docs to reflect that Google seems to be capping
the limit to 32 or less.

- Jordan