I am unable to get any results with the Places API when I use a types=transit_station|neighborhood (or any other type included in the table 2 here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/supported_types.html#table2
Apparently, this is not related to a specific location (I've tried both Milan, Italy and London, GB), so I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong or if the API is not currently working as expected.
If the above has no solution, I'd be very happy if there was another way of finding the neighborhood of a building (for instance, in this map: http://g.co/maps/hfdke I'd like to be able to find "Fiera Campionaria", "Il Portello" etc).
First of all:
Keep in mind that you only can find a place that has been created by somebody. Also remember that the places-API is experimental.
I also didn't find any place of type neighborhood in Milan or London.
But I find them e.g. in Paris, New York, Washington, so you may test your application there.
What I realized while playing around with the API: When I define the range to search for by location and radius the results often are very inaccurate.
For example I search for a neighborhood starting by a point in radius of 5km, it will find a neighborhood in 4km but not in 400m.
The results are much more exactly when I search within LatLngBounds
What you are looking for are sublocality's, this can be confirmed through a Places Autocomplete API request:
Input "Fiera Campionaria" returns "Fiera Campionaria, Milano, Italia" with types "sublocality", "political", "geocode": https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/autocomplete/json?input=Fiera%20Campionaria&sensor=false&key=your_api_key
Input "Il Portello" returns "Il Portello, Milano, Italia" with types "sublocality", "political", "geocode": https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/autocomplete/json?input=Il%20Portello&sensor=false&key=your_api_key
Unfortunately a Places API Search request in this area with types specified as "sublocality|political|geocode" does not return these results: https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/search/json?location=45.47536640,9.15523110&radius=3000&sensor=false&types=sublocality|political|geocode&key=your_api_key
I have reported this Internally as a bug.
Cheers
Chris
翻译