Yelp, Google's API for restaurants help

Ok I have looked into this, and I’m not sure if anyone else has experience with it. I’m having termendous difficulties with Yelp and Google’s API.

To help explain what I am trying to do here is the concept of the website. We would have to pull restaurants based on user distance, and then randomize them based on quality of restaurant based on feedback from review websites (Yelp, Google, urbanspoon, zagat, opentable, kudzu, yahoo - doesn’t have to be from all), and feedback from our users (on results page for the random restaurant users can select good recommendation/bad recommendation). There’s a lot we could calculate for our formula. Things that will dictate your results will be based on if you’re at home or work. If you’re at home you will have more time to drive out to the city to grab some dinner or lunch. If you’re at work we would have to recommend restaurants nearby as lunch is typically 30 minutes to a hour. A 30 minute lunch would require take out most likely or quick service. A hour lunch break you could dine in at a local fine dining restaurant. So in a nutshell, user comes to website. Select if they’re at home or work, click submit and we will have a random restaurant selected for them to go. If they don’t like it they can click retry and a new restaurant can show.

The issue I am having is using the API to gather all the restaurants in the US. I know it can be done because there are similiar websites/apps that pull restaurants that are closest to you such as Ness, Alfred, and I believe there’s two more but I can’t remember the names.

Anyone know if this can be accomplish? As I desperately need some help. Thanks in advance!

you can try google places api or foursquare. both should be able to give you results of restaurants. but not all restaurants in a city/country.
pls do take note of the usage limits of google maps though.

I think you just need to pick primary u.s. restaurant locations. I’d choose Yelp since they are the most popular restaurant look up.

I just peeked at Yelp API and seem to have exactly what you want

http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v2/search_api

Update

Didn’t notice this post is very old…