Google Place with R

Question

My purpose is to use R to query google api. I have a list of addresses and names (belong to shops, restaurants, etc.) and for each of them I need to store:

"latitude", "longitude", "business type"

My idea is to use google place api:

-Use the Text Search Requests to search the address to store latitude e longitude

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/textsearch/xml?query=address&key=AddYourOwnKeyHere

-Then use the Radar Search Requests to search the name nearby the latitude e longitude. So I get the ID_place

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/radarsearch/json?location=latitude,longitude&radius=1&keyword=name&key=AddYourOwnKeyHere

-Thanks to the ID_place, I query the Place Details Requests to get detail about business type (es. "types" : [ "food" ] )

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/details/json?placeid=ID_place&key=AddYourOwnKeyHere

I'm very new to use google api and maybe is not the most efficient way to do it. But I need to give some consideration: -Sometimes the address is not complete (sometimes I have the civic number missing) -Not always the name is correct (sometimes I have abbreviations)

I need to understand some things:

• -If this is the best way to do it
• -How query these Google api with R
• -How handle the json output

Answer 1

To access the Google Places API in R you can use my googleway package, and in particular google_places().

This also handles the JSON output for you.

library(googleway)

key <- 'your_api_key_goes_here'

df_places <- google_places(search_string = "cafe", 
                           location = c(-37.81827, 144.9671),   ## melbourne, AU
                           key = key)

df_places$results$name

# [1] "Time Out Fed Square"    "Dukes Coffee Roasters"  "Alice Nivens"           "Little Cupcakes"        "Lindt Chocolate Cafe"   "Cafe Andiamo"          
# [7] "The Journal Cafe"       "RMB Cafe Bar"           "Cafe Issus"             "ACMI Cafe & Bar"        "Ponyfish Island"        "Aix Cafe"              
# [13] "Seedling Cafe"          "Eliana Lulu"            "B3 Cafe"                "Lindt Chocolate Cafe"   "Switch Board Cafe"      "Urban Express Cafe"    
# [19] "Cento Mani"             "1932 Cafe & Restaurant"

If you want more details about a given place you can use google_place_details() to search for one of the place_ids returned from the previous query

df_details <- google_place_details(place_id = df_places$results[1, "place_id"],
                                   key = key)

df_details$result
# [1] "restaurant"        "cafe"              "bar"               "food"              "point_of_interest" "establishment"

df_details$result$reviews
#      aspects            author_name                                    author_url language rating
# 1 0, overall Fredrich Oliver-bently https://plus.google.com/114792371400821038660       en      2
# 2 0, overall           Jenn Besonia https://plus.google.com/110502657363574676299       en      2
# 3 0, overall             Sewa G S R https://plus.google.com/118332347441422887680       en      1
# 4 0, overall             M Mathumbu https://plus.google.com/104636428392041496439       en      2
# 5 2, overall                 Bo Cui https://plus.google.com/104475569220729624507       en      4

Answer 2

You could use library "httr" to get the result from google API:

res<-GET( "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/radarsearch/json?location=35.325153,-80.946239&radius=5000&name=YOURNAME&key=YOURKEY")
jsonAnsw<-content(res,"text")

then you could use library "jsonlite" to handle the result:

 myDataframe<- jsonlite::fromJSON(content(res,"text"))

Answer 3

You can use ggmap package with something like :

library('ggmap')
dataToMap = rbind(lon=longitude, lat=latitude)
geo.df = NULL
for(i in 1:length(dataToMap[,1]){
    location = geocode(dataToMap[1,],override_limit=TRUE,messaging=FALSE)
     geo.df = rbind(lon=location$lon[1], lat=location$lat[1])
    Sys.sleep(1.5)
}