Question

I have researched this for a long time and have not found an answer. I am trying to figure out how to, on google maps, find the closest point from a group of points from any given location or point.

Let’s say there are three Walmarts scattered around the city. I want to know if I can figure out which Walmart is closer, from my position, road wise not as the crow flies.

I don’t know how to do the whole maps API thing; so I hope someone has something like this already. Where I can just enter in addresses. Or maybe can show me step by step way of doing this.

Answer 1

Take a look at the DistanceMatrix service in the v3 API:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/distancematrix.html

It returns a table of the driving distance/time from all the origin points to all the distance points.

You’ll basically want to something like this

var service = new google.maps.DistanceMatrixService();
service.getDistanceMatrix({
    origins: [myPosition],
    destinations: [walmart1, walmart2, walmart3],
    travelMode: google.maps.TravelMode.DRIVING,
    avoidHighways: false,
    avoidTolls: false
 }, callback);