The past two days have been consumed with trying to figure out how to fulfill the get google local listing for a url story. Yesterday a lot of my time was spent with Pranav researching API’s to do this. We found two: BrightLocal and the Google Web Services API. We decided to go with Google because it seemed more reliable.
Today we implemented the API by sending a request to the API with a certain query and our API key and getting a JSON response. Once we were able to get a JSON response, we had to parse the response and return whether or not a certain url has a local listing in Google. We decided to do this by first extracting the main text from the URL and then checking that against the names of the businesses in Google. When we tried to do this however, we came into some issues with the names not matching the url exactly and there being a lot of exceptions to using the url to find a business. At the end of today, everything just seemed to be breaking and we could no longer get JSON responses from the API, as in the requests array had a length of 0. This might be because we may have maxed out our number of requests made to the API for the day, so hopefully this issue will be resolved quickly tomorrow morning!
Joyce
