Question

Does anyone know how to use the rank by distance search option that is mentioned here?
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/places#place_search_requests

Listing this in the request options doesn’t seem to work. Here’s my portion of code relative to this:

var request = {
  location: coords,
  //radius: 30000,
  keyword: ['puma, retail'],
  types: ['store'],
  rankBy: google.maps.places.RankBy.DISTANCE
};

service = new google.maps.places.PlacesService(map);
service.search(request, callback);

function callback(results, status) {
    if (status == google.maps.places.PlacesServiceStatus.OK) {
        for (var i = 0; i < results.length; i++) {
            createMarker(results[i]);
                            listResults(results[i]);
        }
    } 
}

Code will locate and list results if I include a radius, but the results aren’t listed in ascending order by distance. Google’s docs say a radius isn’t necessary either if using the rankBy option. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Was having the same problem.
As per this source: http://www.geocodezip.com/v3_GoogleEx_place-search.html
I was able to formulate the query as such:

var request = {
location: gps,
types: ['food'], //You can substitute "keyword: 'food'," (without double-quotes) here as well.
rankBy: google.maps.places.RankBy.DISTANCE, //Note there is no quotes here, I made that mistake.
key: key 
};

Var key is API key which is not required but added for later use. GPS is:

var gps = new google.maps.LatLng(location.lat,location.lon);

Lastly, I did everything that you did except I added bounds to a map that I was not going to use. For that I did:

var bounds = new google.maps.LatLngBounds();