Calculate Distance Ourselves?

[reptile18]

(related to issue #174)

Maybe instead of using Google to get a list of locations and then checking which ones exist in our database, we could skip Google altogether and do the distance calculation ourselves. I bet lat/lng distance calculations would be quite simple since they're just coordinates? Then we could have way more accurate results without worrying about Places being filtered out on Google's end based on their ranking system or by the sheer number of Places in the area (since only 20 results are returned at a time).

Caveat is that I don't know a good way to pass in a list of place_id's to Google without having to make multiple API calls and I don't know what the tradeoffs are between making the call for 20 closest Places vs. making 20 calls to like Details Request (though we could limit it to like 3-5 closest loos unless they upgrade to premium or something).

[reptile18]

Another thing is that this might require us to check every location in our database every time people go to the home view? It's taxing from a performance point of view, but it's also free (compared to Google). We could also maybe limit checking to only places with the same zip code?

[reptile18]

We would need to store lat/lng and also confirm we're allowed to do so according to Google TOC.