Posted by Austin Chau, Google Data APIs Team


With Geo-based search for YouTube API, you can now find all those wonderful videos nearby a particular location. And of course, a visitor to your site is most likely interested in his/her current location when using this feature. This is where the Gears Geolocation API comes in handy.


Gears Geolocation API provides a best-effort approximation (WIFI-based for PC and GPS/CellID-based for mobile devices) of your physical location. The Gears module builds on top of the IP-based ClientLocation locator we previously blogged about. When you combine these two features together, you can create some really interesting and useful applications. Check out this demo that I put together that let you geo-search for videos nearby your current location and overlay them with Google Maps. The demo source code for this can be found here

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Gears Geolocation builds on top of the IP-based ClientLocation locator we previously blogged about, but with a more sophisticated approximation.