Google announced that it has integrated the Places API with Google Maps search in an effort to offer more consistent search results across Google Maps and the API and provide better search quality for API responses.

The company said it is modifying how it supports place type restrictions in the Places API web service and JavaScript library. As of February 8, they have replaced the types restriction parameter with a new type search parameter.

This impacts developers who have been using the types parameter for Nearby Search, Text Search, or Radar Search.

“Type search works similarly to types restriction, but it only supports one type per request,” said Google’s Marcelo Camelo. “Requests using the types parameter and those specifying multiple types (for example, types=hospital|pharmacy|doctor) will continue to return results until Feb 8, 2017, but we do not recommend using multiple types in a search request. After that date, requests with multiple types will no longer be supported. To ensure the best possible search results for your users, we recommend using a single type in search requests.”

Google is also changing the list of supported types, dropping the types establishment, food, health, general_contractor, finance, and place_of_worship. These will no longer be available as searchable types as of February 8, 2017. The types will still be returned in search and details results.

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