Local Business Discovery with Google Places API: Best Practices

Five practices that separate "Maps API hobby project" from "production lead pipeline":

Tile your geography. Text Search caps results at 60 per query. Split a city into a grid and run a query per cell.
Dedup by place_id. Don't trust name+address matching — Google does it for you.
Cache Place Details. They're cheap-relative-to-search but rarely change. 7–14 day TTL is sane.
Restrict the API key. By referrer, by API surface, by IP. Loose keys cost real money.
Stay inside the ToS. Don't store full Place Details indefinitely. Re-fetch on a TTL.

This article is a stub

Coming soon: a working Python tile-generator, the dedup query, and the TTL'd cache table schema we use in Cold Scout.

Five practices that separate "Maps API hobby project" from "production lead pipeline":

Tile your geography. Text Search caps results at 60 per query. Split a city into a grid and run a query per cell.
Dedup by place_id. Don't trust name+address matching — Google does it for you.
Cache Place Details. They're cheap-relative-to-search but rarely change. 7–14 day TTL is sane.
Restrict the API key. By referrer, by API surface, by IP. Loose keys cost real money.
Stay inside the ToS. Don't store full Place Details indefinitely. Re-fetch on a TTL.

Coming soon: a working Python tile-generator, the dedup query, and the TTL'd cache table schema we use in Cold Scout.