Google Places API brings out Autocomplete for better predictions


google places

Google as a part of improving their continuing effort to help 3rd party developers, has brought out Google Places Autocomplete to make things easier for developers to add location awareness to their applications. What does this mean for developers? Well, by adding location-awareness to your application it bring tons of value and joy to the users. The Places API Autocomplete service, a feature of Google Places API and the Google Maps API v3’s Places Library, brings the same type-ahead-search technology from Google Maps to third party apps, helping you soothe some of the users’ address entry frustration.

To make autocomplete even more accurate and useful, Google updates automatically, biases predictions towards the user’s location based on the requester’s IP address. That means, results that are closer to the user will appear sooner in the API’s responses, saving users even more keystrokes and time. For example a calendar app like Sunrise, where editing and adding locations quickly is important, this feature comes in handy.

Sunrise on iOS

Google also provides a handy CSS guide to help developers add their own design and style to the Autocomplete widgets. Interested developers can go ahead and check out the Developer Documentation to learn more about this.


Author: Siddharth Sai

Siddharth Sai is a former Googler passionate about Devices, their security and functionality. He writes occasionally, and is pro-active on the use of day to day Technology.