Small thing: I would drop the "bulk" as the tagline is too much of a mouthful and "bulk" is unnecessary. It's free at smaller volumes anyway, so certainly not deceptive to drop it.
Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
71–80 of 104 posts
Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
#72Love it. I'll keep using my current service for now (SmartyStreets), but I'll let you know two things I noticed: 1) Most services will accept shortcuts for names, like "SF" for San Francisco or NYC for New York, but in both cases, I got error messages instead of geocodes. 2) Addresses that aren't "properly" formatted (i.e., without commas or something) often return very incorrect information. Here's an example: 2680…
Thanks for the feedback! We don't currently support shorthands for city names - only states. But this is definitely something that's on the todo list now. Our address parser will try to pick up the address even if isn't formatted correctly with commas, but it obviously won't work in all cases. Address parsing is indeed a very complex problem.
Address parsing is actually very easy. Knowing when you got it right (or wrong), that's the hard part, and that's where address validation come in handy.
If you can start with a list of all the following, you've got a great start:
prefix abbreviations street names street types suffixes city names state names
Add to that all the possible misspellings and then factor in levenshtein and soundex to account for misspellings you didn't know about and you've got a pretty dang good address parser. Figure out how to do that lickety-split fast, and you've got gold.
Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
#73What's preventing people from simply signing up for Google Maps API for Business then sending your requests that way and returning the results?
Thereby spreading out the bulk cost of an API license amongst your customers who have to pay a significantly smaller amount, but adding up to profit?
Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
#74For 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…
I had the need to geocode 10s to 100s of thousands of US addresses weekly, with the ability to accept slightly-reduced accuracy vs. the parcel-level accuracy of Google Maps.
I rewrote the geocommons geocoder in Java to speed up the loading and geocoding process, and wrapped a REST api around it. I used a minimal perfect hash function to map zips/streets (metaphone3'd and ngramfingerprint'd) to data stored in a key-value structure. The key-value structure is small enough to fit in memory of a decent sized EC2 instance, but I haven't tested the throughput except from a slow disk--which got me about 100-150 results/sec.
The results include parsed address, lat/lng in WGS84 datum, and associated US census region info (state, county, block group, block, msa, cbsa/csa, school district, legislative district, etc.).
I'd considered open sourcing it, and I was trying to architect it such that one could plug in various data sources beyond TIGER when higher-accuracy info is available (e.g., from SF's address parcels, Massachusetts has lots of E911 parcel data available, etc).
Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
#75Is there a similar service for reverse geocoding? US and international?
Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
#76What's preventing people from simply signing up for Google Maps API for Business then sending your requests that way and returning the results? Thereby spreading out the bulk cost of an API license amongst your customers who have to pay a significantly smaller amount, but adding up to profit?
I would imagine what you're talking about is a violation of their terms of service.
Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
#77Will your service be expanding to provide reverse geocoding? we would be interested if it did both (we need both).
If there's enough interest, we'll definitely be working on this next. It would just require a slight restructuring of our data to make the lookups as efficient as possible.
I'd be interested in this. We'd pay if it was accurate, fast, and available.
Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
#78Very nice! Can't wait to try it out.
What does the "accuracy" value in the return mean? Maybe I am missing something but I don't see it in the FAQ or docs.
Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
#79Congrats on the product! Just a couple website level things: - http://geocod.io/contact/ says DC but shows me a map centered somewhere south of Topeka. - Random $0.02 suggestion: stop using "ridiculous".
I'm getting a map centered in Brooklyn. I'm in Midtown Manhattan... so, maybe its trying to find our location?
Are you close to Topeka?
Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
#80Congrats on the product! Just a couple website level things: - http://geocod.io/contact/ says DC but shows me a map centered somewhere south of Topeka. - Random $0.02 suggestion: stop using "ridiculous".
I'm getting a map centered in Brooklyn. I'm in Midtown Manhattan... so, maybe its trying to find our location? Are you close to Topeka?
It is. I'm in Minneapolis, it showed Minneapolis.