Foursquare Venue API & Number of Results

Question

Is it possible to get more than 50 results from the Foursquare Venues API? (https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/venues/search.html)

The default limit is 50, but it does not make any mention of pagination or offset to get additional listings.

Please advise.

Answer 1

As answered here

The API docs here can help.

Foursquare searching is very closely linked to the location 'point' (the 'll' param on the query) that you provide. The simple answer is that to find more venues within a given area, you need to simply query again with a different location 'point' within that area.

Two queries, both at points close to one another:

https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?ll=40.700,-74.000&limit=50
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?ll=40.705,-74.005&limit=50

will get you two different sets of venues (that may overlap, depending on how close the points are).

The default intent for the search method is 'checkin', which will return the 50 most popular locations closest to that point. If instead you want to look at all the venues within an area, you can use the 'browse' intent. This takes either a 'radius' parameter, in which case it returns venues inside a circle around the given point with the given radius, or it takes two coordinates representing the 'sw' and 'ne' corners of a rectangle. So, you could do:

https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?ll=40.705,-74.005&limit=50&intent=browse&radius=50

which will give you 50 venues within the 50m circle around that point. A smaller radius will reduce the number of venues returned. So, by varying the radius and the point at which you search (or the size and position of the rectangle described by the 'sw' and 'ne' parameters), you can get more venues returned.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

For the record, Foursquare now offers a pagination parameter in their API request:

"offset - Used to page through results."

https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/venues/explore