I played with the places API recently more specifically for neighboring suburbs with a given lat / long coordinate.
I pointed out that I want to show the types of "locality" from this coordinate, which was a point cook in Victoria, and also gave a radius of 5000 or 5 km. The results were accurate, however, when I increased the radius to 10,000 ', the results decreased in size, and when I gave a radius of 30,000', the only area that appeared was Melbourne. Weird
Now I know that without specifying a rank distance, it shows results based on popularity, so I changed it to a rank distance, showing types of "locality", but this caused a zero results error!
I don’t understand why this is so, and I have tried different types, such as subregion, zip code and geocode, all producing zero results. However, if I indicated types such as food, the results began to show.
All I want to do is get a list of postal codes and / or suburbs near this coordinate or in radius. Am I starting to believe that the buggy API is impossible or cannot be done using APIs?
Thanks a lot in advance, and I hope someone can clarify this.
I am also considering using a set of localized nearby zip codes rather than relying on google, however the client was initially adamant, they wanted to have a similar feature on airbnb.com, which I believe uses only google sites.