Is there an API to maintain business locations in Google Places?

Question

Is there any way to add a business with complete information (with address, geospatial location, categories, trading hours etc) to Google Places in a programmatic fashion?

We want to add new franchises to a listing of stores. Manual changes are too brittle, the bulk upload takes a long time to be confirmed and the standard Places API has only a very limited method on it. Am I missing something or is there no support for managing your own store listings via an API?

Answer 1

I don't think you're missing anything at this time. Support for that sort of thing is currently limited to what's documented at the link you provide, I believe.

The Places stuff is in the odd grey area where Google is kind of pushing it and promoting it, but also saying that it's just in Labs, it's just experimental, etc., so it may not have all the features you need.

There might be other ways to get your businesses into Google Maps, if your concern is Google Maps generally and not the Google Places stuff specifically. If they exist, they may have more fully featured API capabilities for updates. Or this might be a big dead end.

If this issue is closer to a big annoyance instead of a total dealbreaker, then the approach I'd recommend, if you can wait long enough, would be to implement what you can in the existing API, and keep an eye on the API docs to see if they add more capabilities in the coming months. Open a feature request for Places API in the issue tracker and maybe keep an eye on other features requests there, especially issue 2431 .