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Search Nearby POIs

Problem: Find places near a point — by free text, or by category.
Three endpoints, three different jobs.Choosing wrong produces a store finder whose nearest store is third in the list, or a search box that returns the closest match instead of the best one. This is the most common POI integration bug.

Prerequisites

  • A HERE API key with Geocoding & Search entitlement
  • export HERE_API_KEY="..."
For consumer place discovery — business hours, reviews, photos, category depth — Google’s data is better than HERE’s. Not marginally. Categorically.Placematic sells HERE. We would rather you know this before a migration than after.HERE is the right choice for truck-relevant POIs (truck stops, weigh stations, rest areas), for your own locations (which belong in your database, not a public index), and when you already license HERE for routing.

The code

Response walkthrough

id — the HERE ID. Cache it. Use /lookup on subsequent access. distance — metres from the at context centre. On /browse the list is already sorted by this. On /discover it is not. categories — HERE’s taxonomy. It does not map onto Google’s. A migration that assumes a mapping table produces silently wrong filters.

Common mistakes

Using /discover for a store finder. Relevance ranking. The nearest store appears third. Using /browse for a free-text search box. Distance ranking. The best match appears last. Using /geocode for place search. That endpoint resolves addresses. Not caching by HERE ID. Re-searching for a resolved place. Assuming category taxonomies map across vendors. Querying a public place index for your own stores. Your stores are in your database. A public index will silently miss the one that opened last week — map data ships on a release cadence. POI search on map pan. Every drag fires a query. Expecting reviews, photos, or reliable hours. Using POI queries for zone containment. That is ST_Contains in your own database. See Geofencing.

Production considerations

Cache by HERE ID. Places move slowly; users search for the same ones repeatedly. Debounce user-facing search. 200–300ms. Keep your own locations in your own database. See Store Locator. For truck stop planning, join POIs to the route, not to a circle. “Truck stops along the remaining route” is the question dispatchers ask; “within 10 km of the driver” is not. Map the taxonomy explicitly if you run both HERE and Google. Be explicit about which surfaces stay on Google, and why, before someone calls a deliberate hybrid a failed migration.

Points of Interest

Truck POIs, the taxonomy problem, and the honest comparison.

HERE Geocoding vs Google Maps

Where the place-data gap decides your architecture.

Store Locator

Your stores are not a POI query.

Nearest Store Search

The correct pattern: PostGIS shortlist, matrix rank.

HERE documentation


Need production HERE API keys or implementation support? Placematic is an official HERE Technologies reseller and implementation partner. Talk to us.