Google Maps Terms of Service - saving some data to a database
- by R.M.
I've read the terms of service, and, from what I understand, I'm not allowed to store any information I retrieve from the Google Maps API. Are there any exceptions to this?
More to the point, I'm planning on building an application that shows the user several points of interest (like restaurants, libraries etc) at a certain distance around a location he chooses (it can be in one city or more, depending on the distance he chooses). There are two problems:
The first problem is that (at least for my country) the geocoder doesn't locate exact addresses, at best it only locates street names (but completely ignores street numbers) in larger cities. It is even worse for smaller rural areas. So the only way to accurately show the places on the map is by storing their coordinates in the database.
Another problem seems to be with calculating distances. To show the points located below a certain distance from the user, it would mean I would have to use GDirections to get all distances between the user's location and the other points, to see which ones to show. That would be really slow for the user (since I also have to set a small delay between requests), and it would also send a pretty large amount of requests to google. Would I be allowed to store those distances in a database?
The users would not be able to access a list of all the stored information, they would only see the names of the places, and a map with some markers on it.
Thank you.
