The Places Insights API is a service that provides insights about places within a specified area based on criteria like location, type, operating status, price level, and user ratings. This 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
Travel agency
A travel agency wants to help tourists choose the most exciting area to stay in across their hotel listings. By analyzing the proximity to top tourist attractions, restaurants, bars, and nightlife using the Places Insights API, they can compute a vibrancy score for each listing, enabling users to make more informed choices.
Research agency
A research agency wants to perform comparative market analysis and ensure their field operations are well informed. To do this, they can use the Places Insights API to obtain counts of various business types across different regions to ensure they have coverage of a statistically significant number of businesses for their research.
Real estate investment firm
A real estate investment firm wants to enhance their financial models and accurately determine the ROI on their 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 app needs to determine the amount of resourcing required for restaurants, convenience stores, liquor stores, and bars. Using the API, the app's maintainers count these establishments within the target city, letting them plan and allocate resources effectively for the expansion.
Location assessment
A retail chain that plans to open a new store in a large city. The Places Insights API can help analyze the number of competitors within a specific radius and gather data on their operation status, price levels, and customer ratings to make a data-backed decision on where to open.
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, 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.
After you submit your request, the API returns a ComputeInsightsResponse that
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.