I am using the Google Places API to retrieve all the POI (Places of Interest) around a the current location, it works ok but I have noticed that whatever the value of the radius is, I always get the same number of results (~ 20). As a result, if I give a radius that is too big, I don't necessarily get the nearest POIs. If I reduce the amount of the radius to be small enough, I will retrieve those nearest places again (from experimentation, I have noticed that 100 meters is a proper value) but that means that I will not get any POIs beyond 100 meters which is not quite what I want.
My question is: is there any way by which I can get all the POIs (with no limitations) within a certain radius.
Thank you!
The Google Places API always returns 20 results by design, selecting the 20 results that best fit the criteria you define in your request. The Developer's Guide / Docs don't explicitly cite that number anywhere that I have seen. I learned about the limit watching the Autocomplete Demo & Places API Demo & Discussion Video, given by Paul Saxman, a Developer Advocate at Google and Marcelo Camelo, Google's Technical Lead for the Places API.
The entire video is worth watching, but more specific to your question, if you set the playback timer at about 11:50, Marcelo Camelo is contrasting the Autocomplete tool versus the general Places API, and that's the portion of the video where he mentions the 20 result limit. He mentions 20 as the standard result count several times.
There are many other good Places API and Google Maps videos linked to that area on YouTube as well.
As mentioned on the Google Places Issue Tracker here: http://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=3425
We are restricted by our data provider licenses to enable apps to display no more than 20 places results at a time. Consequently we are not able to increase this limit at this time.
It does sound like you are however trying to return results that are closest to a specified location, this is now possible by using the 'rankby=distance' parameter instead of 'radius' in your request.
e.g.
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/search/json?location=-33.8670522,151.1957362&rankby=distance&types=food&name=harbour&sensor=false&key=YOUR_API_KEY
Try google.maps.places.RankBy.DISTANCE; as default is google.maps.places.RankBy.PROMINENCE;
An easy example of this is shown Here
(Chrome only)
