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Comment by TurdF3rguson | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little underwhelmed by the api, it tells me if the business exists and is open, which is a tiny subset of what google places can tell me.

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Fair point - one doesn't instantaneously dethrone Google three months after starting. Here are some benefits of our API. Google's api is recall focused as any search - it shows you all possible places even if that one you are looking for doesn't exists. It is your job to find out if any of the returned results match the one you were looking for. Also, we have more convenient terms of use - you don't have to delete data after 30 days and don't have to attribute data when displaying.

Aren't you just scraping Google's data though? Also I looked up a place that doesn't exist and it responded with: "existence_status":"not_exists","open_closed_status":"open"

No, we are not - it is against Google's the terms of service.

open_closed_status is an indicator showing if there are sufficient evidences of the closure. If place doesn't exist, then there are likely no evidence of anything related to it, including closure. It could be confusing, but we will iterate on that.

Ok. I don't believe you but I respect the hustle. My only other note is the repo doesn't have any code in it and your github handle has zero history. At least vibe code a python client and put it in there if you want people to take you seriously.

Fair point on the repo - cli is in the plans and coming. We've been focused on the API

what's your plan to get all this data and maintain it?

There is a a lot of data publicly available on the web, it can be analyzed with the derived signals stored and then re-checked periodically.

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