Question to Foursquare engineers :) Could you please explain to me why I cannot find restaurant using /venue/search end-point ?
Restaurant in question is Aqua in San Francisco. According to /venue/ID request restaurant location is 37.793489,-122.399905. So I'm calling /venue/search request with intent=checkin with exactly these coordinates.
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?v=20130712&ll=37.793489,-122.399905&categoryId=4d4b7105d754a06374d81259,4d4b7105d754a06376d81259&intent=checkin&radius=100&oauth_token=QEJ4AQPTMMNB413HGNZ5YDMJSHTOHZHMLZCAQCCLXIX41OMP
API returns me 30 items with no Aqua in it. Where as in documentation it says:
Unlike the checkin intent, browse searches an entire region instead of only finding Venues closest to a point.
So then why doesn't it return items sorted by the distance from the point I provided?
If I change intent to browse I'll get "Aqua" in results.
Basically behavior looks inconsistent. How can I make it more reliable ?
It looks like this is happening because this isn't a venue that Foursquare thinks you're likely to check in at. Given your lat/lon and radius, Foursquare thinks that you're more likely to check in to the 30 results you see than the restaurant you have in mind.
However, if you either reduce the radius or increase the number of results, you'll find the restaurant in question.
Related
I am a beginner user of Foursquare API.
Most of the Foursquare techniques I learned so far is to do query such as search for or explore from a single location point (e.g. a café or a hotel) in a single geographical coordinate pair of longitude and latitude.
My question is, if it is possible to make an query to explore venues within an area, instead of in the vicinity of a single location point. By ‘an area’, I specifically mean the unit of the administrative division, such as a borough, of a neighbourhood.
In other words, my intending query, if possible, would start from an area specification of the administrative division of my interest (e.g. borough), such as its name or its border’s geographic coordinates—as a 'key' to link with Foursquare data, rather than start from a single location point.
I downloaded GeoJson file that already defined the geographical coordinates of the border of the administrative division of neighbourhoods in a city that I am interested in (link: http://cdn.buenosaires.gob.ar/datosabiertos/datasets/barrios/barrios.geojson). Just FYI, in this link, the neighbourhood is described as ‘barrio’ and the border is defined in the form of 'Polygon'.
I just wonder if I can use an area specification—either the name of an administrative division or a set of the geographic coordinates of an administrative division's border—as a key to make an query about venues such as restaurants, hospitals, and polices within the unit of an administrative division (e.g. borough) from corner to corner.
I guess that the underlying question is if Foursquare side has such info stored in somewhere in its system: if not, my contemplated approach would not work.
Or there might be a totally different workaround to achieve my goal.
If anyone can advise me on this matter, I would highly appreciate it.
Thanks
Given the parameters listed in the docs I think that the best approach would be to use the ll or near parameters and also include a radius so you can limit the search for a given area or region.
To get the middle point for the polygon I guess you would need to do some math but shouldn't be that difficult.
Besides this I think there doesn't seem to be any other parameter in Foursquare API to search by area or by a coordinates array (polygon).
Anyways, I would suggest that you go through the Foursquare API docs for both search and explore endpoints and check for yourself.
since you already have the polygon of interested region:
you could fit many small radius circles within to cover majority of the area.
this is not recommended as it may be rate limited or get you blacklisted but: the foursquare website has a 'draw' tool that allows you to draw a polygon and search venues within. (open networks tab under inspect in your browser and see request) I have noticed that it also can't take very complex polygons, no enclaves, and it further aggressively simplifies polygons to remove holes/dents/land bridges.
here's my demo requests. polygon search isn't strict and might show some venues outside the border.
the url:
https://foursquare.com/explore?mode=url&polygon=35.957999786220704%2C-80.41236877441406%3B35.897393965545646%2C-80.38215637207031%3B35.87847989454576%2C-80.55107116699219%3B35.954664894270834%2C-80.54901123046875%3B35.994118756097%2C-80.386962890625%3B35.957999786220704%2C-80.41236877441406
the corresponding get for venues:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/search/recommendations?locale=en&explicit-lang=false&v=20210302&m=foursquare&limit=30&intent=bestnearby&polygon=40.8252411857252%2C-74.00630950927733%3B40.817446884558805%2C-73.99772644042969%3B40.81147063339219%2C-73.99875640869139%3B40.80757278825516%2C-74.00768280029297%3B40.80887209540822%2C-74.01729583740234%3B40.81406906961218%2C-74.02175903320312%3B40.8197852710803%2C-74.02210235595702%3B40.826280356677124%2C-74.01695251464844%3B40.8252411857252%2C-74.00630950927733&wsid={}&oauth_token={}
I am playing with Foursquare API and I was wondering if theres an endpoint for getting a similar venue in a location given another venue?
All I found is this endpoint:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/VENUE_ID/similar
Which returns a list of venues similar to a given venue. What I want is, exactly this but I want the returned venues be close to a given location.
For example:
I love a mexican restaurant in London.
I want to find a similar restaurant but in Barcelona.
Is that possible?
Thanks!
The venues/similar endpoint will only show similar venues near the desired venue. Your best bet is probably using the query parameter with venues/explore. The query parameter is pretty smart about determining your intent if you know what you're looking for and you can specify any location.
i.e.
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/explore?
query=Mexican food outdoor seating
near=Barcelona
When I wanted to check in, I noticed that Swarm doesn't sort venues based on distance alone. Closer venues can (somehow) end up lower in the list. Yet my current venue mysteriously appears on the top even if it's not the closest one.
I'm currently implementing SQL-backed cache on top of the Foursquare API (so that I don't have to call the API too often) and need to replicate this behavior.
When I issue API venue/search request with intent=checkin, the correct venue pops out on top right away. But when I do a distance-sorted search in my database (with identical data), the outcome is imprecise and thus unacceptable.
Does anybody have any thoughts on this matter? What algorithm might Swarm be using to achieve this kind of precision given only a location and the accuracy of measurement?
Is it possible to search venues (via venues/search) in whole city without passing "radius" parameter? Because I don't know radius of each city :) Documentation says "Searches can be done near a point or through a whole city", but how can I provide this in venues/search?
Thanks.
I do not think there is a way to tell it 'search the entire city', but I also think it might be a wrong use case.
You need to remember a few things when searching:
Foursquare will return up to 50 results (the limit parameter)
The 50 results are ordered by the most popular places around the center of your search
So if you are searching a city which have more than 50 venues in Foursquare database, 'searching the entire city' will usually get the same (up to) 50 results - always.
This where the filters comes in handy, in our case, to get you better results for our needs, we use the categoryId combined with the radius to get things we want to show our users. Sometimes we get information from other cities because of a big radius, but for our application its okay, we actually give our customers more options :) . I can also guess that a lot of apps also use the query filter as they know the name of the place they are looking for.
You just need to experiment with it and discover how to get the data which is right to your application.
In theory, to search an entire city I would use the city lat/lng from Google or Open Street Maps or geonames and do a 10Km search around that point (intent=browse, radius=10000), the following is a guess, but it will get 50 places for over 99% of the cities people who own smartphones live in :)
You can do obtain results within in a city as follows:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?near=Singapore,Singapore&client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID
&client_secret=YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET3&v=YYYYMMDD
For more details check the documentation:
https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/venues/explore
Assuming you're talking about requests with a query, I would just set a reasonable value for radius and use the city's default city center. If you want to avoid showing results from neighboring cities, you can post-request filter by the returned venue's "city" string in the location stanza.
I'm getting some erratic results from Foursquare's venue search API and I'm wondering if anyone has any tips on how to process my input parameters for the most "intuitive" results.
For example, suppose I am searching for a venue called "Ise Sushi", around "New York, NY", which is equivalent to (lat: 40.7143528, lon: -74.00597309999999) using Google Maps API. Plugging into the Foursquare Venue API, we get:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?query=ise%20sushi&ll=40.7143528%2C-74.00597309999999
This yields pretty underwhelming results: the venue I'm looking for ends up rather far down the list, at 11th place. What's interesting is that reducing the precision of the coordinates appears to produce much better results. For example, suppose we were to round the coordinates to 3 significant digits:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?query=ise%20sushi&ll=40.7%2C-74.0
This time, the venue I'm looking for ends up in 2nd place, even though it is actually farther from the center of the search (1072 meters, vs. 833 meters using the first query).
Another modification that appears to help improve the quality of search is substituting underscores for spaces to separate our search terms. For example, here's the original query with underscores:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?query=ise_sushi&ll=40.7143528%2C-74.00597309999999
This produces the most intuitive-seeming results: the venue I'm looking for appears first, and is accompanied by just one other result, "Ise Restaurant" (which is tagged as a "sushi restaurant"). For what it's worth, this actually seems to be the result set of the same search conducted on Foursquare's own website.
I'm curious what lessons I should be learning from this. Should I be reducing the precision of my coordinates? Should I be connecting my search terms with underscores, and if so, does that limit how a user can order their search terms?
Although there are ranking improvements we can make on our end to find this distant exact match, it generally also helps to specify intent=browse (although it looks like in this case, for now, it may give you worse results). By default, /venues/search uses intent=checkin, which tries really hard to find close-by matches for checking in to, at the expense of other ways a venue might match your search. Learn more at https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/venues/search