How Does Places Work?

Overview

Quality Data, Updated and Verified Daily

Our data is sourced from billions of consumer check-ins from Foursquare’s apps,
feedback from businesses, web crawls and 3rd party data. We aggregate, clean, cluster, and QA billions of inputs each day, verifying through machine learning, automated processing, and human contributions.

Superior POI

Get access to 100+ million global POI across 200+ countries and territories. Places API returns more detailed information than our competition. It has more categories to filter searches by (1,100+), more data attributes (60+), and more accurate geocodes, including rooftop center, preferred drop off location, and front door location.


Use Cases

Surface meaningful search results in your app

• Power geo-tagging functionality by returning a list of venues based on a user's real-time location

• Leverage autocomplete to return live suggestions as users enter a search
query location.
• Highlight the top ranked POIs based on a user’s location to power location matching
and check ins suggestions as users enter a search query location.

Complement core place details with rich, contextual content

• Choose from dozens of place attributes like name, address, ratings, and reviews for
millions of POIs.
• Surface unique and rich place attributes such as "takes credit cards" or "gluten-free diet" in your app or website.

Increase contextual awareness for better market and BI assessment

• Surface up-and-coming destinations by tracking changes in foot traffic volume via
our Trending Popularity score.
• Monitor changes in visitation volume over time using our foot traffic score for site
planning, territory mapping, or investment strategies.
• Enable transaction record cleansing through location match and classification percentage of customer transactions.

Fuel navigation and mapping experiences

• Leverage POI search results and user location to optimize maps for pick up and
drop off destinations
• Populate maps with consumer driven POI data and things to do nearby
• Optimize POI search with venues based on an app user’s location

Methodology

Over the past 12+ years, Foursquare has developed a map of the world using first party data derived from over 14 billion explicit check-ins from our consumer apps. We’ve also merged with leaders in the space to increase our breadth of sources and improve our ability to ingest, aggregate, clean, cluster and summarize billions of location data references. We have also accumulated numerous geographic datasets, geospatial assets, and validation rules.

Foursquare combines our first party data, ground truth datasets, web resources, and partners with third parties to incorporate updates and ensure near 100% coverage. We also partner with trusted listing syndicators that ship daily updates for millions of places on behalf of leading brands, chains, and small business owners. They actively manage their POIs through regular data updates.

Our datasets are ingested into our proprietary processing pipeline, which applies our machine learning algorithm to de-dupe, normalize, and enrich the data. And our validation method is best in class. In addition to employing our proprietary technology, we incorporate human validation by a dedicated community of Superusers (see Glossary). Foursquare also conducts Human Verified Audits of our points of interest, ensuring we deliver places that are real and open for business.

A rigorous quality assurance program allows us to improve the quality and fill rates of the data for commercial use. The result is the world’s leading independent location platform.


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