Technically what is an "application" when referred to in the Google Static Maps Rate Limits docs

Question

From https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/staticmaps/#Limits I read:

The Google Static Maps API has the following usage limits:

25 000 free static map requests per application per day.

If I'm not providing an API key in the URL, how does it determine the limit? IP of the referring page? domain of the referring URL? IP of the client?

Answer 1

We used the static maps on our website, we've discovered it uses the IP address of the client. So someone who looked at our website a lot would find the big your quota has been exceeded image would appear for them but not for me.

Answer 2

I start by declaring that I do not know this, but the logical choice is the domain.

With ip restriction multiple clients on the same web server would consume each others quotas which they should have thought of.

*Client ip would be useless in every metric. *Server ip would mean multiple clients on one host would consume each others quota.

Whats left is the domain. However with that said, Google is know to use their brains and I would not be surprised if they have a combination running to find abuse. Like so.

If domainA.com uses up 25 000 in one day and them immediately domainB.com comes online and starts asking for images from the same ip that might ring some bells.

Of course the same would be true even for different ip if they all request the same location.

So in summary, I think if you randomize which domain asks for the map at any given cient request and only locally mark a domain as spent (for the day) when you get error back I think you can request infinite amount (if you have infinite domains). With the possible caveat of detection if all request the same location.

Of course spreading the different domains over different servers/ip would make it impossible to detect, however unlikely it's needed.