hasdata-google-maps

Google Maps through HasData

Six tools, and five of them need a place you already found. Start with hasdata_google_maps_search_performMapSearch, which takes q and optionally ll for the map centre, then carry the identifiers it returns.

Which identifier

Place details take placeId. Reviews, photos and posts take placeId or dataId, and sending neither returns a 422 naming both. Contributor reviews are a different axis: they take contributorId and return everything one person wrote, which is how you check whether a reviewer is real.

The search is the map, not a directory

q behaves like the Maps search box, so coffee in Austin works and a bare category plus a separate city field does not. ll pins the centre when the query alone drifts, and gl with hl set the country and language of the answer.

Two answer shapes, and the key says which

A category query returns localResults, an array of about twenty rows carrying position, title, placeId, dataId, phone, address, website, workingHours, openState, rating, reviews, gpsCoordinates and more. That is usually enough to answer a contact or ranking question without opening a single place.

A query that Maps resolves to one entity returns placeResults instead, a single object rather than an array, and localResults is absent. Phrasing alone decides it, since coffee in Austin gave the array while coffee austin texas gave the object. Test for the key before iterating, because code that reaches straight for localResults finds nothing and reports an empty area.

There is no empty answer here. A nonsense keyword still returned one unrelated company in placeResults rather than a miss, so judge whether the result matches what was asked instead of treating any response as a hit.

Reading the payload

An empty posts array is real data: most listings post nothing. A place id that does not resolve is a clean error with requestMetadata.status set to error, so tell those two apart before you report "nothing found".