We’ve seen a lot of information on the Google Places API. However, there are a lot of specific details about Places API requests which we’ll cover here.

Nearby Search

Formerly know as simply Place Search, the nearby search is the simplest way to find places within a specified area. You are able to specify a center, and a radius to search within. This search will return a list of 20 places by default, and 60 with a Premium Plan license.

Text Search

The Text search allows a user or system to execute a places search without a specified location, by using a text query. The search can also be biased by passing location information.

Radar Search

Radar Search allows the user to specify the same parameters as the Nearby Search, and will return 200 results instead of 20, but with limited returned data.

For all the searches, you can pass the value of the next_page_token to the pagetoken parameter of a new search to see the next set of results. If the next_page_token is null, or is not returned, then there are no further results.

The following is a list of the required and optional parameters, and which search methods are able to be used with them.