41–50 of 104 posts
UI suggestion: 'street addresses' currently has a box around it, so I thought it was an field, thought "how cute", tried to click on it to enter an address to geocode, and was disappointed to find out it was just some bolded text. Might be a fun little feature to have that actually be an entry point into trying out a demo of the API (I thought I was supposed to enter an address to have geocoded).
I really like the look of your API. I work a lot with location-based apps, I'll probably be giving this a go :)
For an API, you can also try http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/ (which is kinda free -- and uses OpenStreetMap data). The biggest problem we've had is changing non well-formed addresses / ambiguous addresses into canonical addresses with lat/lng. Google Maps wins on that front.
We obviously can't beat Google in that case :) That's also why it's priced to be way more affordable. It does however happen that Geocodio is more accurate than Google Maps - try for example "8895 Highway 29 South, 30646" (Address of a CVS store) on Google Maps and Geocodio.
setting it up was quite a pain because they don't use semantic http codes, and I had to play with it a lot to handle their undocumented error codes (they store it inside body.info.statuscode). Good to read that you return semantic http codes.
If you want to differentiate from the competition, I would suggest that you improve the address parsing and support more patterns. Think of us having to geocode user-typed location fields from twitter. Enjoy it :)
We ended up using that as a base and then making some customizations for our US-based geocoding solution. As these guys are figuring out, there's no great int'l option. Google is bad from a licensing perspective (but their tech is fantastic). MapQuest is great but can get really expensive. We've had decent luck with TomTom I think, but if I remember correctly there are a lot of caveats.
For those looking to roll your own, the Ruby implementation of a TIGER geocoder released by GeoIQ a while back is a pretty solid starting point: https://github.com/geocommons/geocoder/ We ended up using that as a base and then making some customizations for our US-based geocoding solution. As these guys are figuring out, there's no great int'l option. Google is bad from a licensing perspective (but their tech is fant…
[1] https://github.com/geocommons/geocoder/wiki/Installation-Ins...
I wonder how the "choose your own api key" policy is going to work in practice... given that people don't usually make very secure passwords and that the example is "Real estate website" you're going to get some pretty easy to guess api keys.
How does the dataset compare to google? Would love to see some side by side comparisons.