What I'm trying to create, is an app that will allow me to download list of places near given coordinates. With Wikipedia api it's fairly simple:
http://api.geonames.org/findNearbyWikipedia?lat=47&lng=9&username=some-username
This code run with curl in php gives me an xml response with list of places and possibly their descriptions along with exact coordinates matching the given ones (which are not exact). Is there a way I can do it as simple as above, with GoogleApi? This link: http://code.google.com/intl/pl/apis/maps/documentation/mapsdata/developers_guide_protocol.html#SpatialSearch tells very briefly about spatial search, and I can't find any info on this topic in the internet - like where can I find my user and mapid, how can I get my authorization token.
I know, that this may seem a stupid question for you, but google maps api doc is vast, and I just can't find anything more, than in this link above.
In sum: I don't want to embed google map on my page, I just want to get places near given coordinates, and list them to my users, and I have to do this on server-side.
At the very top of that page, it says "Google Maps Data API (No Longer Available)", so I don't think you should use that.
Instead, look at Google Places API. It's only a developer preview, but looks like what you need.