Searching for and showing nearby places

Google Maps is not only about beautiful base maps with an immense cartographic quality or regularly updated satellite images. In your daily life, not as a programmer but as an ordinary user of Google Maps, you will have no doubt used Google Maps to search for places; be it The Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York, or a commonplace farmacia in Rome.

This information is in Google Maps, but how can you reach and serve this information through the Google Maps JavaScript API?

The places library is there exactly for this purpose, and it enables you to look for places by using certain search parameters.

You can perform nearby searches where place results would be near the location that you have provided, most commonly, the user's location. You can search within a radius, or you can just specify a search string. You can even request for additional details, such as related photos, review ratings, phone numbers, and opening hours for particular places.

This recipe...