I have a site that associates Google Place information with users, and displays that information on a map. For instance, a user can search for a place (currently with the Places Library Autocomplete API) and bookmark this place for later retrieval.
As per the Google Maps TOS, I am only storing the Place ID and its reference in my database and am making client-side requests for the coordinate information of each place whenever I need to display them on a map.
I've recently encountered an issue where making more than 10 consecutive API requests for coordinate information (within a javascript loop) using the getDetails method on the service object returns an OVER_QUERY_LIMIT status code.
My question is this: if I am correct in assuming that storing the latitude and longitude of each place in my database violates Google's TOS, how can I programmatically retrieve the coordinate information for a number of places so that I can display these places on a map for a given user?
According to the terms - 10.1.3(b) -
(b) No Pre-Fetching, Caching, or Storage of Content. You must not pre-fetch, cache, or store any Content, except that you may store: (i) limited amounts of Content for the purpose of improving the performance of your Maps API Implementation if you do so temporarily, securely, and in a manner that does not permit use of the Content outside of the Service; and (ii) any content identifier or key that the Maps APIs Documentation specifically permits you to store. For example, you must not use the Content to create an independent database of "places" or other local listings information.
So if there are places getting queried a lot, you can temporarily store information on that place to increase performance.
Related
Sometimes the Web Detection API is not able to detect multiple objects in an image, hence I'm considering using Object Localiser. But Object Localiser essentially returns the bounding box co-ordinates (as shown in the documentation example). So how can I take the results from Object Localiser and send to Web Detection API so that I can get a list of individual web entities/products?
It's basically similar to the use case 'Vision Product Search' mentioned on the Cloud Vision landing page except would want to reference products indexed by Google instead of our own products.
As the title says, my app takes parameters from the user and displays relevant locations around them. But from what I understand, the Google Maps API terms prohibit you from doing this. Can this use be termed as a listing service, where I'm simply displaying the data I got from Google. I'm also providing all relevant attributions.
I am developing a node.js application which (amongst other things) will recieve location information from remote users and allow them to interact with each other via the server.
I'm using the Google Tracks API because I like the idea of being able to track users when appropriate, set up geofencing to define my coverage areas and to visualise what's happening.
The Google tracks API documentation is reasonable, however I'm not sure how I would go about actually visualising the entities and geofencing I have setup on a map - this is not something that I can find covered elsewhere.
Ideally I would be able to simply embed a map into a webpage which could link with my Tracks API account and show all of the fencing and entities. Another nice feature would be the ability to 'draw' a geofence, is there anything out there which would allow this?
Thanks :-)
Tracks API does not currently offer any kind of server-side rendering for your Tracks data, so the best approach is to use the API to retrieve the crumbs (or just current location) and render them using polylines (or just markers) in the Google Maps API. You can similarly get all your geofences and render them using polygons.
Because this is done clientside, you'll probably want to limit your data to a reasonable number (depending on the browser/OS combination, something like O(thousands) of vertices).
All this assumes that your app meets the terms of service of the Maps API so check those out as well.
Ok! So I have spoken to a google representative about this issue, however since I am not enterprise level, he can't push me to tech support and suggested that I use the SO for answers. Here is the question...
In Google Maps Terms it states the following:
(b) No Pre-Fetching, Caching, or Storage of Content. You must not pre-fetch, cache, or store
any Content, except that you may store: (i) limited amounts of Content for the purpose of
improving the performance of your Maps API Implementation if you do so temporarily (and in
no event for more than 30 calendar days), securely, and in a manner that does not permit
use of the Content outside of the Service; and (ii) any content identifier or key that
the Maps APIs Documentation specifically permits you to store. For example, you must not
use the Content to create an independent database of "places" or other local listings
information.
This led me to originally believe that google would not allow caching of any type of information. However, then I read the following:
When to Use Client-Side Geocoding
The basic answer is "almost always." As geocoding limits are per user session, there is no risk that your application will reach a global limit as your userbase grows. Client-side geocoding will not face a quota limit unless you perform a batch of geocoding requests within a user session. Therefore, running client-side geocoding, you generally don't have to worry about your quota.
Two basic architectures for client-side geocoding exist.
Run the geocoding and display entirely in the browser. For instance, the user enters an address on your page. Your application geocodes it. Then your page uses the geocode to create a marker on the map. Or your app does some simple analysis using the geocode. No data is sent to your server. This reduces load on your server, but doesn't give you any sense of what your users are doing.
Run the geocode in the browser and then send it to the server. For instance, the user enters an address. Your application geocodes it in the browser. The app then sends the data to your server. The server responds with some data, such as nearby points of interest. This allows you to customize a response based on your own data, and also to cache the geocode if you want. This cache allows you to optimize even more. You can even query the server with the address, see if you have a recently cached geocode for it, and if you do, use that. If you don't, then return no result to the browser, and let it geocode the result and send it back to the server to for caching.
So one side says you cannot cache, the other side tells you, you should. Another solution it states is to always use clientside when you can, but then this becomes a grey area as well, because both examples state that you must have a user input data. What if the jquery read data from a div or span and then geocoded the information? The user wouldn't have actually done the geocode,but it was still done client-side? I'm trying to create a site that has a bunch of events generated by users and this site could get pretty loaded, so I am trying to determine the best practice in being able to do this. Google suggested here, so before you go and say this is "off-topic" please note, this is where they stated me to post.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
The first quote does not explicitly forbid caching data at all. It is ambiguous as to how much you can cache (what number explicitly is "limited amounts"?) but it does not forbid caching.
You are allowed to cache the data if it helps improve the performance of your site as long as you retain the data for no longer than 30 days and do not make it available in any way to any other service except the service that originally retrieved the data.
Regarding user interaction - if your user explicitly enters a page with the expectation that they will be shown geocoded information I would assume that this would fulfill "user interaction".
As an example from a project I worked on last year I had it set up to do the following:
- Show markers on the map
- If the user clicked a marker they were shown a popup with data from the cache if available, otherwise a geocode would be performed and the returned information would be cached along with the date/time of the cache.
Another page of the site showed a history of these markers at 5 minute intervals throughout the day. If cached data was present (from clicking the map marker as in the previous part) this would be shown, otherwise a geocode would be performed and the data cached as before. The user clicking to run the report was (in my opinion) enough "user interaction" to not count as pre-fetching as the user had to manually select a timeframe before the report would be displayed.
A cronjob then ran every day at midnight which would go through each record with cached data over 25 days old and remove it.
As it was I was caching much less than 10% of the marker positions being shown (20+ markers being updated every minute, but the report was being run on maybe 3-5 markers each day and only geocoding data for every 5th point).
I am building an Events site in which the address of a given event will be stored to be used within a map on the page. Whilst viewing an Individual Events' page i would like to provide a list of similar events on side of the page. I would also like to rank this list by distance and display a small map with a marker on it for each item on the list.
I was thinking of Geocoding the Events address upon content input and then storing this data within the sites database. Doing this would allow me to calculate the distance of an event on the server and then provide an ordered list to display.
My question is this:
Would this violate the Googlemaps Terms of Service?
These terms:
"the geocoder for any purpose other than obtaining locations that will be displayed using the Google Maps APIs is a violation of the Terms of Service. You may use the HTTP geocoder to geocode addresses outside of your Google Maps API application so that they may be cached and later displayed using one of the Google Maps APIs, but locations obtained using the Geocoding Web Service may not be used by any other application, distributed by other means, or resold."
Suggest that storing the data is not a problem but i am unsure that the process of ordering the list by long lat would not result in a violation.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
As long as the map your refer to in your question is a Google Map and you are using the geocoded data to display features on a Google Map, you are fine. The client-side google.maps.Geocoderdev-guide is intended for dynamic requests that are based on real-time user interaction that drives a need to perform on-the-fly geocoding. But Google encourages you to consider using the Geocoding Web Servicedev-guide on the server-side, when you wish to pre-geocode static addresses or coordinates prior to using the response values on a Google Map. Storing those values is assumed.
It is common to perform some form of post-response/post-storage processing on those values, just like the ordering by distance that you describe, to fit whatever use case is needed to populate your map with the appropriate data. I understand you want to be careful to remain within the TOS, but what you describe sounds pretty standard.