Google Places vs. Qype vs. others

Question

at the moment I am working on a regional evaluation system.

I actually want to e.g. find out how regions are composed, let us say given a lat long coordinate and a radius. Hereby I would really like to be able to separate by type and it is also necessary for the data to be up to date.

So which API based services do you recommend, if the following factors are important:

• support for lat/long coordinates with search radius
• differentiation by type of location
• up to date information

As far as I know Google places and qype.com offer APIs which should be able to do so. Is there a better option or which of the both do you recommend and why?

Answer 1

As far as I found out only Qype and Google Places offer the APIs. Google offers 1000 requests per day for free while Qype only offers 200, but one could apply for multiple keys in Qype which enables you to do more requests a day.

With Qype it is possible to check the full amount of commercial establishments in range (bounding box or radius), while google places has a restriction to 60 places per request.

That is the reason why I decided to use Qype. About whether or not the information is up to date I did not make an evaluation, but Qype shows reasonable results when applied to Munich.