Foursquare Venues/Explore API: SIghts

0
votes

The Foursquare venues/explore API, section parameter is not functioning well for me.

When specifying "sights" under the section parameter, I get many things, including food venues that shouldn't be there. I do not have this problem when specifying food, arts, outdoors, etc.

You can test this out by changing the section parameter here:

https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/explore#req=venues/explore%3Fll%3D40.7,-74%26section%3Doutdoors

...and looking for the ['response']['query'] result. It is non-existent when you specify "sights".

Does anyone have a workaround? I would like to use the venues/explore endpoint because of the sortbydistance parameter.

3
foursquare
I'm having trouble replicating this issue. Are you still experiencing this? What are some venues being returned that you aren't expecting? - enc_life
@enc_life Here's an example - looking for sights around NYC. api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/… . Since I specified "sights", I don't want to see all of the restaurants. Besides that, I would expect to see a better listing of "sights" in NYC than what is returned... seems arbitrary. - tvorm

3 Answers

1
votes

The section=sights parameter should return venues that people tend to visit when they are traveling to a new area. These are generally over-indexed to things like parks and monuments but will also contain restaurants and bars if they're worth visiting.

These results aren't curated so you won't they won't be like a traditional guide-book (empire state building, statue of liberty, etc) but provide a unique perspective based on people that travel to and live in the area.

If you're interested in tourist specific things try removing the section parameter and use a query term of tourist or whatever you're trying to achieve. The venues/explore endpoint is pretty good at parsing query terms into meaningful results.

0
votes

I am facing the same issue, and I am afraid it's because Foursquare is trying to promote those restaurants..

My idea is simple, do another query with section=food and remove each of this if it is in sights.

Another idea is checking if 'food' in ['venue']['categories'][0]['icon']['prefix'] also nightlife shouldn't be in sightsas well.

0
votes

I solved this using venues/explore end point by not specify section value with this query parameter

query=tourist

// plus other parameters e.g. ll, radius

This combination give me attraction places where traveller mostly travel to. So far I don't see much restaurants in the results.