Content by CityGrid

Introduction

Content by CityGrid is an API suite providing local content for over 18 million businesses. As a CityGrid publisher, you can easily access this information from within your applications, giving your users the ability to easily find and learn about local places.

The suite is comprised of three Content APIs:

• The Places API provides functionality for information on local businesses, including search, detail, user content submission, and predictive text.
• The Offers API provides coupons and special offers from businesses based on geography and category.
• The Reviews API provides access to customer reviews for businesses selected by id or by geography or category.

Search and Detail

Both the Places and Offers APIs provide search and detail endpoints. The search endpoint allows you to query based on information such as category and geographic location, and returns one or more items that match the search, each with a small amount of information suitable for creating a convenient search result display. Each result contains an ID that you can use in a detail query. When the ID is passed to the detail endpoint, detailed information about that particular place or offer is returned.

Search and detail endpoints can be used together in several ways. For example, an application could show a map with icons at the locations of local coffee shops by using the Places Search endpoint (which returns latitudes and longitudes). When an end user clicks an icon, a Places Detail query can retrieve detailed information on the selected coffee shop. In addition, a user could search for offers within a given category (e.g., movies) and a given municipality (e.g., Los Angeles) by using the Offers Search endpoint. When a user selects an offer, the application queries the Offers Detail endpoint to display the details of that offer, including the expiration date and redemption code.

Place IDs

In addition to using the Place IDs returned from Places Search, you can query the Places Detail API using the Place ID supplied by one of the many sources of data merged and aggregated by CityGrid. This functionality is not yet supported in other APIs. When querying by ID, supply the source of the ID in the id_type parameter. Place IDs from the following companies' data are supported: