I was having this same issue when working with the Google Places API. I was trying to grab the closest places within a specific radius and Google Places would return a random assortment of places within that radius as opposed to the closest 5 or so places.
I did find a very rough work around that might work in your case. I noticed that by tightening up the search radius or distance I received closer places in my query (obviously). But this was the only way I could get the closest places that I knew existed within the API that were close to the current location.
Check out this post that is the same issue.