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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T09:17:28+00:00

I’m trying to do a query via the Places API to find places related

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I’m trying to do a query via the Places API to find places related to the term wakeboards near Washington, DC. However, the results I’m getting back show law firms. Here’s the query I’m making: 

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/search/json?location=38.897244,-77.0413344&sensor=false&radius=5000&keyword=wakeboards&key=XXXYYYZZZ

And, here is the result that I’m getting…

{ “html_attributions” : [], “results” : [
{
“geometry” : {

        "location" : {

           "lat" : 38.9088260,

           "lng" : -77.04382099999999

        }

     },

     "icon" : "http://maps.gstatic.com/mapfiles/place_api/icons/generic_business-71.png",

     "id" : "54ebf52e053beb9b3f4d8c753975571eb532a8d7",

     "name" : "Marshfield Associates",

     "reference" : "snip",

     "types" : [ "finance", "establishment" ],

     "vicinity" : "21 Dupont Cir NW # 500, Washington"

  },

  {

     "geometry" : {

        "location" : {

           "lat" : 38.8932170,

           "lng" : -77.02048499999999
        }

     },

     "icon" : "http://maps.gstatic.com/mapfiles/place_api/icons/generic_business-71.png",

     "id" : "82d45a91169dda03932d8cba1cbb66007ce985ef",

     "name" : "Gravitas Capital Advisors",

     "reference" : "snip",

     "types" : [ "finance", "establishment" ],

     "vicinity" : "601 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington"

  },

  {

     "geometry" : {

        "location" : {

           "lat" : 38.9195570,

           "lng" : -77.027940
        }

     },

     "icon" : "http://maps.gstatic.com/mapfiles/place_api/icons/generic_business-71.png",

     "id" : "dba09f9090c092573b8c4ab0de10b8d2ac921e3e",

     "name" : "Casa Iris",

     "reference" :"shortersnip",

     "types" : [ "establishment" ],

     "vicinity" : "2201 12th Street Northwest, Washington"
  } ], "status" : "OK" }

Clearly “Marshfield Associates” doesn’t sell wakeboards. So, what am I doing wrong in this query? I have also tried it via a third party API/wrapper, and it returns the same results.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

P.s. sorry for the crappy formatting of the json response. Not sure how to get it to wrap nicely in SO.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The easy solution to this problem is to go to Google Maps, insert your location (38.897244,-77.0413344) and then “search nearby” for wakeboards manually. The full search results on the website usually draw attention to the exact match.

    I did so and my results suggest that Marshfield Associates is coming up because findthebest.com is keyword spamming on their business listings and “wakeboards” happened to be one of the keywords spammed on that page. Unfortunately, false positives like this are common on Google Maps, because location is weighted so heavily — on a normal web search, keyword spam like this wouldn’t even make the top 1000.

    The other obvious false positives are also on findthebest.com with exactly the same keyword spam text (which is rather unusual and may point to a technical malfunction on the part of that site). Here’s a link that should go to the exact search I’m looking at: http://g.co/maps/2ny2p see H, I and J.

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