Help! Query exceed limit - anything to do with calculating driving distance?

[kShan]

I know there are other threads on this subject but I couldn't find an answer. Do note that I have read as many articles as possible and still there is no clear answer. Our development is stuck and we would Greatly Appreciate Your HELP!!!

 

we are building a website where a user will input his address looking for a list of hotels close to him. after geocoding the user's address we calculate the Driving Distance (not air distance) between the user and the hotels and display the ones with in 10 mile radius. We do not have more than 15 records in the database at any given point. The query we send to Google is to find the driving distance between the user and (say) 10 records in the database;

 

We are running in to Query Limit exceeded error at this point. Right now it is development phase and we have not even run close to 50 queries a day. We do not run in this issue if we are calculating the air distance between the user's address and the 10 records. Only happens when we try to calculate driving distance. Our development has stopped and we are clueless.

 

 any help greatly appreciated.

 

[MymsMan]

You probably want to use the distance matrix service to calculate rather than the directions service
 http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/distancematrix/

[kShan]

After much research we decided to display results based on straight line distance instead of calculating driving distance. Even driving distance API has restrictions on the number of elements we can use per day. We will run in to this issue when we go live.

This is our approach as we don't want to run in to the 2500 quota limitation when we go live; Would aprreciate if you can point out any concerns we should be aware of in the below approach

We will be using client-side Geocoding. so when a user does a search for a hotel on the website, all requests will be counted against the user's IP address
Example: if there are say 3000 searches done in a second by 3000 different users, and if we use clientside geocoding then that 3000 requests will be counted against the client's IP addresses. Our hosting server will not hit any quota limitations
We will be displaying the results in a map to meet Google's terms of Use
On a separate page, when a user clicks on a hotel, we display the hotel's address as a marker in google Map. This is again client side geocoding.

Anything else we should be aware of? all answers/help greatly appreciated. Thanks!