Clarity on Google Maps terms of service, and alternatives

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
tgeller's picture

Hey, gang. While my site is in development, I'm using Google Maps for both geocoding and map display. But there are a few issues that might make that a poor choice for the production site:

  1. Nearly all of the mapping is private, visible only to the admin (me).
  2. My map points just disappeared suddenly. I suspect it's because I've gone over the limits, but it's not clear to me. I know there's a 2,500-request geocoding limit; but once you've geocoded an Address Field, no more geocoding calls are needed, right?
  3. Is there a limit to the number of times you can display maps, or points on maps? (I have over a hundred points on this map.)
  4. Assuming Google Maps/API is the problem, could you recommend a free and open geocoder?

Thanks in advance!

Comments

Interesting questions that

tinem's picture

Interesting questions that also interest me as I made http://beta.findtoilet.dk/ and also are a little unsure how all this is functioning.

I had a similar recent

greggles's picture

I had a similar recent experience and think it was just Google dropping support for an old version of their API. If you use a relatively recent gmap module it was using the old API and several features got broken. I think that's fixed now, but in the mean time...

I've been basing all new work like this on http://drupal.org/project/geocoder and http://drupal.org/project/leaflet - both appear to be lighter-weight and support pluggable backends. I feel a lot better knowing that I can easily switch out which provider I'm getting data from even if I happen to choose google in the short term.

Nope, not from the version change

tgeller's picture

Thanks for posting, Greg. Nope, I just created this site, and am using Google's API v3. So that's not the problem.

For the Geocoder module, which geocoder are you using? Google's? Someone else's?

I'll try Leaflet -- maybe that'll fix the problem.


Tom Geller * Oberlin * San Francisco * TomGeller.com
Author/Presenter, Drupal video series at lynda.com
Creator of materials for Drupal-focused companies

Maybe this site

tinem's picture

Maybe this site https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/usage can help you and this groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3/browse_thread/thread/329a52030f2ab396#. Don't think my site will have any of these problems though.

Thanks for the links

tgeller's picture

Thanks for the links! The first one, in particular, will probably help somebody (if not me).

(By the way, I'm experiencing major flakiness in my maps -- and it might not be Google's fault. Points simply disappear, and I get an error when I try to view all points -- see https://drupal.org/node/1959030. Bah.)


Tom Geller * Oberlin * San Francisco * TomGeller.com
Author/Presenter, Drupal video series at lynda.com
Creator of materials for Drupal-focused companies

Location and Mapping

Group organizers

Group categories

Wiki type

Group notifications

This group offers an RSS feed. Or subscribe to these personalized, sitewide feeds: