Get total "Areas/Zones" in which I am currently in, based on Current Location

Question

Let us suppose we have three hotels: Hotel A (popular in 1 km radius), Hotel B (popular in 2 km radius) and Hotel C (popular in 4 km radius). A car enters and is at some position. These Hotels (or any other place) is added by us and is custom.

Problem is I want to find the hotels which have popularity/influence at my current location.

And I want it to do totally with the help of Google Maps. Is it feasible ? on Android (optional)? Please ELI5.

Answer 1

Google Maps API has a function called computeDistanceBetween. It "returns the distance, in meters, between two latitude/longitude coordinates". Circle has the Center and Radius properties. So you need to calculate the distance between the center of a circle and you current location. If it's less than the radius of the circle, than it means your current location is within the circle.

Answer 2

Simplifying is key

Although I understand your objective (get a list of all hotels near you) I believe your explanation threw many people off guard. You don't need to triangulate positions and calculate radius of circles - not with Google Maps APIs and Services.

All you need to know is if you want a solution for front-end, back-end, or mobile

Google Maps Places API Web Service (back-end)

The Places API has a very useful feature called "Places Nearby". To quote the documentation of this feature:

A Nearby Search lets you search for places within a specified area. You can refine your search request by supplying keywords or specifying the type of place you are searching for.

Which looks exactly like what you need, right ?

To make a request from a server to the Places API Web Service looking for nearby places, you can do the following:

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/nearbysearch/json?location=-33.8670522,151.1957362&radius=500&type=restaurant&name=cruise&key=YOUR_API_KEY

Do remember to change the key=YOUR_API_KEY to a valid key field. The example showed will look for restaurants in a radius of 500 meters around the location of -33.8670522,151.1957362.

There are a lot of parameters to this and you can read more about this in the following documentation

https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/search

Google Maps JavaScript API with Places Library (front-end)

If you however don't have a central server or service to make requests for you, making the clients send the requests directly is also an option.

In this case, there is the JavaScript API. The JavaScript API is a client-side friendly API that re-uses some of the Web Service's features.

In this case, you can use the JavaScript API in conjunction with the Places Library for it. According to the documentation, this API allows you to do "Nearby Search Requests":

A Nearby Search lets you search for places within a specified area by keyword or type

An example of such a request can be seen in a live example in the following link https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/place-search

You can read more about the parameters and usage of this API and this library in the following documentation https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/places#place_search_requests

Google Maps Android API (mobile)

From the picture you added, I assume your app will be to "use on the go" (perhaps a mobile app), or something similar.

In this scenario, using a web-server or a website could be cumbersome, as by the time you have a response from it, the car is already in another position !

To aid you in this, there is also the Android API. To use it you need to:

1. Download and Install Android Studio
2. Add Google Play Services Package (contains APIs you will use)

You can read more about this process here https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android-api/start

As for code and examples, I strongly suggest you check out this GitHub repository of samples https://github.com/googlemaps/android-samples

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Our Hotels may not show up on Google Maps

Unless your DeLorean takes you back to the latter half of the 19th century, or you are stuck in an island with hundreds of Meerkats, poisonous pools and a tiger wondering if he should eat you or not, Google Maps will pretty much always show you some hotels where you can spend the night.

PS: kudos++ if someone gets my references :P

Adding Hotels and Places to Google Maps APIs and Services

If this is still not enough however, there is still a way you can fix it. You can add Hotels addresses and Places to Google Maps by using one for the two following methods:

• Send Feedback
• Use Maps Maker

Send Feedback

The "Send Feedback" feature allows you to send feedback to Google's data teams for review. Once approved, the data is added to Google's database and will be available to all Google's customers. You can do this by following the steps described here https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3094045?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

Please do note however that the review process for your feedback will take some time, so don't expect anything instantaneous !

Use Maps Maker

Alternatively, you can use Maps Maker. This tool allows you to do edits and add information to our Services in a more streamlined manner.

At first, your edits and suggestions will still be reviewed, and it will usually take less than two weeks to get something approved.

However, with time, as more and more of you suggestiogns are approved, you gain reputation, and when you have a lot of reputation, your suggestions will be pretty much automatically added.

Before using it however, make sure you have a look at the list of supported countries.

Also, if language is important, you may want to consider it as well, by checking the list of supported languages.

I really don't want to add anything to Google Maps

Sometimes the whole business is data itself, so giving it out freely is not an option.

In these cases, you will have you own database, which your services will have to check.

In cases like this a custom solution for your system is needed, but in order to suggest a few more ideas, more information is needed.

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Hope it helps !

Answer 3

Your approach should use fast approximate calculations without relying on apis, and then api usage can be used to enhance user experience.

• You know the coordinates of the car.
• You know the coordinates of each of the hotels.

• Assign a popularity weight to each hotel based on your criteria or data you have. e.g a hotel having more user reviews or transactions or bookings will have higher influence, or if you want to personalize, a hotel which suits the loggedin user's budget preferences ( based on past data or settings ) will have higher influence. Lets call this popularity value p1,p2..p3 etc.

• Find all hotels that lie within a threshold range, say 5kms within current position of the car. This can be done using a geospatial query in any major storage database ( for example if your hotel points are stored in MySQL, or mongodb ), or if you are using a hotel data api, get the nearby hotels,or all hotels of that city, and prune them based on distance from car's current location.

• For linear distance between the car C, and the hotels H1, H2... use Haversine formula , this will give you distance between the Car and any hotel along the Earths curvature. ( Actual road distance might vary, as roads are directions aren't straight and involve turns etc). But this will give you a fast approximation of distances D1 between C & H1, D2 between C & H2 etc...

• Now decay the popularity score P1...PN of each hotel based on distance between the Car C and the hotel H. For example if hotel H1 has popularity score P1= 90, and hotel H2 has popularity score P2=90, but C <---> H1 distance is 10kms, and C<--->H2 distance is 2kms, then H2 will have more influence on the current location compared to H1. A simple formula can be LocationInfluence = PopularityScore/ log(Distance), you can optimize this based on your use case.

• Now for the most influential hotels H1,H2,H3... use DistanceMatrix api to find actual driving distance, you can also use google maps directions api for Android or Javascript to show driving directions to the user, from location till the hotel.