Google Places Search API US & Canada

Question

I feel like I'm being blocked from searching with lat/long in US/Canada some reason.

Any other city in nearly every other continent is returning results, except cities in US/Canada.

I've searched their documentation, there hasn't been anything that's popped up about not working for North America.

What I have working for outside NA:

//Places Search
$apiKey = '';

$url = 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/nearbysearch/json?location=39.0997,94.5786&radius=50000&keyword=car&sensor=false&key=' . $apiKey;

$result = file_get_contents($url);

print_r(json_decode($result, true));

This returns an array:

Array
(
    [html_attributions] => Array
        (
        )

    [results] => Array
        (
        )

    [status] => ZERO_RESULTS
)

Literally putting any city outside of the US/Canada will return a giant array of goodness. What's going on?

Answer 1

Make sure you are providing the latitude and longitude in Decimal format. It is very likely that you are missing the negative (-) sign for your longitude value.

So for something like San Fransisco, which is at 37.7833° N, 122.4167° W, you would want to pass 37.7833,-122.4167