Working with Google Place API

What is Google Place API?

The Google Places API is a service that returns information about places using HTTP requests. Places are defined within this API as establishments, geographic locations, or prominent points of interest, it features over 100 million businesses and points of interest that are updated frequently through owner-verified listings and user-moderated contributions. Through Google Place API, you can get place data from the same database used by Google Maps.

The following place requests are available:

• Place Search returns a list of places based on a user's location or search string.
• Place Details returns more detailed information about a specific place, including user reviews.
• Place Photos provides access to the millions of place-related photos stored in Google's Place database.
• Place Autocomplete automatically fills in the name and/or address of a place as users type.
• Query Autocomplete provides a query prediction service for text-based geographic searches, returning suggested queries as users type.

Each of the services is accessed as an HTTP request, and returns either an JSON or XML response. All requests to a Places service must use the https:// protocol, and include an API key.

The Places API uses a place ID to uniquely identify a place. 

Google Cloud Console

The Google Cloud Console is a powerful web admin UI used to manage and get insights into everything that powers your cloud application — including web applications, data analysis, virtual machines, datastore, databases, networking, and developer services. It helps you deploy, scale, and diagnose production issues in a simple web-based interface.

You need to have a "Google maps API Key" to call Google place API. Go to the Google Cloud Console, you can do the following things there:

1. Pick one or more products.
2. Create a project.
3. Set up a billing account.
4. Enable APIs associated with the products you picked.
5. Create an API key.

If you have never used the Google Cloud Console to create a billing account or a project, click here for more detailed instructions.

Once you have created a billing account and project you are eligible for the Google Cloud Platform $300 free trial and Google Maps Platform recurring $200 monthly credit.

Users with an API key are allowed 1,000 requests per 24 hour period.