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Geolocation API: SimpleGeo vs. CityGrid vs. PublicEarth vs. Twitter vs. Foursquare vs. Loopt vs. Fwix. How to get location / location information?

We need to display meta-information on our website (for example, address, name) for various places, such as bars, restaurants and theaters.

Ideally, users will type the name of the venue along with the zip code, and we present the closest matches.

What APIs do people use for similar geolocation purposes? What are the pros and cons of each?

Our basic research has provided several options (listed in the title and below). We are curious to see how other users have deployed these APIs and which ones are ultimately used.

Does Facebook plan to plan a Places API that can do this?

Thanks!

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4 answers

Facebook Places is evidence-based. You can use the Factual API, which is pretty good (and still free, I think?)

http://www.factual.com/topic/local

You can also use the unauthenticated Foursquare as a direct locations database. The data is of uneven quality because it is crowdsourced, but I find it generally good. It is free for a certain API limit, but I think the paid level is consistent.

https://developer.foursquare.com/

I looked briefly at Google Places, but I didn’t like it because of all the restrictions on how you should show results (Google wants to get advertising revenue).

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It has been a long time since this question was asked, but quickly updated the answers for other people.

This post, at least at least, will not talk in detail about each service, but simply lists them:

Each of them has its pros and cons (i.e. Google Places allows only 20 results per query, Foursquare and Facebook Places have semi-reliable results), which can be explained in more detail, although not completely, in the following link. http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-each-Places-API

In my own project, I decided to go with the Factual API, since there are no restrictions on what you do with the data (one of the only ToS that I read in its entirety). The actual one has a pretty robust API that, as an API user, can update, modify, or mark data rows. Facebook Places bases its data on Factual's, just another fact to shed some perspective.

I hope I can help any future seekers.

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This is not a complete answer, because I did not compare this geolocation API, but there are Google Places APIs that solve a similar problem like other APIs.

One thing about SimpleGeo: The Location API SimpleGeo mainly supports locations in the US (and Canada?). The last time I checked, my native country in Germany does not have many famous places.

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The comparison between the location data APIs is difficult to keep up to date, with a fast past of space, and with acquisitions such as SimpleGeo and HyperPublic, it is rapidly changing the landscape.

So I just want to take a look at CityGrids from February 2012. CityGrid provides 18 million locations in the United States, allowing you to receive up to 10 million requests per month for developers (publishers) for free.

You can search a wide range of What and Where searches (Cities, neighborhoods, postal codes, metro areas, addresses, intersections), including latlong. We have rich data for each place, including images, videos, reviews, offers, etc.

CityGrid also has a developer’s revenue sharing program where we will pay you for displaying certain places, as well as large mobile and online advertising networks.

You can also request Places through the CityGrid API, using Factual, Foursquare and other places of the places providers and place identifiers. We combine data from several providers of location data in our system.

Website: http://developer.citygridmedia.com/

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