The Places Insights API is a service that provides insights about places within a specified area based on criteria such as location, type, operating status, price level, and user ratings. This service can help analyze the density of specific Place Types around a given location, and answer questions like "What, or how many, 5-star rated $$$ restaurants are within a 5km radius of this location?"
Results are returned as either aggregated counts or the identified place IDs in the search area of interest. Users can use the Place Details API to retrieve more information about those Place IDs.
Why use the Places Insights API
The Places Insights API empowers your users to make data-driven decisions based on the comprehensive information you provide about various places. It leverages accurate and up-to-date place models, which supports the following key use cases:
- Businesses: Analyze competition and potential locations for new branches.
- Developers: Build applications that provide personalized recommendations.
- Researchers: Examine trends and patterns in specific areas.
What you can do with the Places Insights API
With the Places Insights API, you can get insights in the following ways:
- Count Insights: Retrieve the number of places that match your criteria.
- Places Insights: Retrieve Place IDs of specific places that match your criteria.
- Filtering: Refine your search based on various attributes such as place types, operating hours, price levels, and customer ratings.
Examples
Opening a new cafe
A restaurant owner wants to open a new cafe. To do so, they first want to visualize where the hotspots of cafes are so that they can identify areas of high and low concentration to inform their business decision. The Places Insights API can help analyze the number of cafes within a specific radius based on attributes like operation status, price levels, and customer ratings to make a data-backed decision on where to open their next location.
Real estate investment firm
A real estate investment firm wants to enhance their financial models and accurately determine the ROI on their planned property investments. By using the Places Insights API, they can gather detailed data on the amenities near potential investment properties, such as ATMs, hospitals, transit stations, and grocery stores, so that they can understand the amenities near potential investment properties.
Retail delivery service
When expanding into a new city, a retail delivery service needs to determine the number of delivery drivers to allocate to a region based on the density of popular consumer destinations, such as restaurants, convenience stores and liquor stores. Using the API, the delivery service counts the total number of these establishments throughout the city so that they can plan and allocate resources effectively.
How the Places Insights API works
The Places Insights API lets you specify filters to narrow your search criteria.
After you select an Insight Type of either INSIGHT_COUNT or
INSIGHT_PLACES, you can add filter criteria, including the following:
- Location: Define the area of interest using circles, regions, or custom polygons.
- Type: Specify the types of places you're interested in.
- Operations Status: Filter places based on their operational status.
- Price levels: Filter places based on price levels.
- Ratings: Filter places based on user ratings.
The API response ComputeInsightsResponse object contains the results of
the request insight. For example, if you selected INSIGHT_COUNT, the response
contains a total number of places, and if you selected INSIGHT_PLACES, the
response contains a list of Place IDs.