Using the CloudMade API or some other geosearching API to get tourism spots?

Question

I've been looking for an online geosearch API such that I can get location data for tourism spots, e.g. historic landmarks, tourism information locations, castles, etc. I'm not looking for a map image, but rather a list of location tagged data. I've played with CloudMade, but none of the object types seems to returning anything like the number of reponses I expect (even with a wide bounding box). None of Bing, Yahoo or Google Maps seems to have a geosearch API w/o the maps -- just geocoding. I've seen apps that find restaurants open 24-hours or apartments for rent near me -- where does that day come from? Thanks!

Answer 1

Where does that data come from:

Nearby restaurant searches are often performed with the Google AJAX Search API using its Local Search mode. It doesn't work for performing vague searches like "tourism spot" or "historical landmark", it needs something more specific like "museum". It's fundamentally a business search (they initially bought data from Yellow Pages, so it's heavily biassed towards organisations that have a telephone) so it won't find natural features. It's also limited to about 8 replies per query.

Apps that find apartments for rent tend to have their own database, and that database is built by reading things like Craigslist.

Answer 2

CloudMade uses limitation on the returning results not to hurt your browser. By default it returns 10 result. You could use "limit=" and "offset=" for paging. And the response contains "found" field which gives you the total number of results.

BTW, couple of weeks ago new CloudMade Geocoding API was published. It is far faster and easier to use.

More info - http://blog.cloudmade.com/2009/10/08/new-geocoding-engine-delivers-results-up-to-24-times-faster/

Documentation - http://developers.cloudmade.com/wiki/geocoding-http-api/Documentation