Ruby/Rails and Google Maps

I'm trying to write a simple app that will allow one to search for something like pawn shops, title pawns, or check cashers near a given city name or zip code within Google Maps.

I want to see how many results are returned and rate the place.

So, something like this:

1. Query Google for a location and a search term.
2. Place the responses in an array.
3. Array.count to get the number.
4. If count is larger than 1 it's not good, if larger than 5 don't go there, if above 10 call the police now and save some trouble.

So I guess the issue is simply using Rails to make these calls to Google's Map service, then parsing what Google gives back to me.

Any ideas?

I dont know too much about it, but there is a google api. According to the pickaxe you can get an account and get a developer key. There are examples there (pickaxe) as well as on google I'd imagine.
I dont know that you need to include rails for such a thing.