Google places API: from CID to reference?

My objective: populate a database with known business places in order to generate maps with those places. I insist on "known places", because my users will only search for the places that are in the database.

I don't want to recreate business places as markers on the map (so latitude and longitude is not enough to id a place), because the places are already available on Google Maps with interesting information (address, comments, ratings, pictures...).

The natural reference is to use the CID and store it in the database.

Now imagine the database is populate with places and their CID, and I want to generate maps with those places as click-able markers. When the user clicks on the marker, she access the business place's page, e.g. http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=998657413562662319. Great!

But how to generate those maps? I don't have the coordinates in the database (assumption). And I cannot use Google Places API (which would give me the coordinates), because it uses a different reference, to retrieve the location of the business so as to generate the maps.

Any ideas?

Thanks a lot!

To clarify: I want to use Google Maps API to generate a map with many business places of which I know the CID. It is comparable to "my maps" in Google. Only that I want to store the places in my database.

Potential solution: For each business in the database, store the name, CID, and coordinates. Write a script that uses Google Places to find businesses at specific coordinates. Loop through the response array (JSON/XML) until the response with the CID corresponding to the searched business is found. Store the Google Places reference into the database. Repeat this script for each newly added business. Cumbersome...

Is this what you are looking for? http://maps.google.com/maps?cid=998657413562662319

It looks like your best option if you want more than one cid on a map is to use: http://maps.google.com/maps?cid=998657413562662319&q=a&output=json