PlacesAPI: Turn any HTML input into an instant location lookup

Hello! PlacesAPI is a super fast geocoding service, built on Algolia, that provides a fast and easy way to add location search autocomplete to your websites and apps. If you've used the excellent Algolia Places in the past you may be aware it is being sunset in May 2022. This is a real shame because that service is fantastic and you may, like us, have multiple clients using it in production who now face an uncertain migration to a new platform. We were facing considerable engineering effort to replace Algolia Places so we decided to build our own service, also built on Algolia. This was initially to help our own clients with their Algolia InstantSearch migrations but now we're opening it up to everyone. By using the platform ourselves the immediate impact has been a huge reduction in migration pressure on our team and, for our use cases, the front-end user experiences are identical. You can use any of Algolia’s tools and client libraries with our service, we particularly like Algolia Autocomplete for its flexibility. We have a REST API too that is based on the Algolia Places REST API but with a few minor differences, again this was initially to help our clients who had location search built into their back-end processes but now anyone can use it.