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Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

geocod.io

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Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#82
post #55

Congrats 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?

Seems like our embed code was bad, I've updated it now. Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#84
post #83

I think this is great. We use Google Maps for geocoding today, we paid around 10k for this years license. If you guys can do the same without the rate limiting restrictions they place on us, we'd switch over in a heartbeat.

We actually don't have any rate limiting currently (we can handle a pretty high amount of concurrent requests and will hopefully be able to scale up hardware before we hit any performance issues).

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#85
post #70
post #68

Neat! If you can get your address parsing up to Google's level or anywhere close, you should do quite well. For others looking for a solution you can play with yourself, here's a VM image with a pretty good geocoder you can set up yourself (iffy address parsing, though): http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org

Parsing isn't the hard part, its the source data, which if you do the math on what Google has done (drive around the world taking 360 video and LIDAR of streets) is literally billions of dollars worth of work. TIGER is a pretty bad starting point, geocoding based on block faces is really inaccurate if you want to zoom in to the street level. And its U.S. only. OSM Nominatim should be a better place to start. I'd love…

What you're talking about (massive ground-level driving effort to pinpoint where along streets specific addresses are located) would boost accuracy. Without a Google level address parser, though, you don't get usability for a lot of use cases, which is frankly much more important for a lot of companies. One of the best things about Google's geocoder is that you can throw various location names, as humans type them, and Google will return something, and it's usually the right thing. For many applications, this is the desired behavior, rather than precision.

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#87
Just for those curious, it's not that cheap actually compared to Google's enterprise level Geocoding. Nor, I'm guessing, is it able to geocode internationally. In which case you might as well use Mapquest, as it's completely free.

Currently, the company I work for uses Google for geocoding and we have 1.1mil a day which ends up costing around $5k (22%) per year more than these folks... but! It includes international geocoding, google maps, etc.

Simply using census data to Geocode US addresses is easy; and there are directions how to do it here in the comments... but setting up Nominatim (from open street maps) is a serious amount of effort (and not cheap for a 32GB server) but /is/ capable of global level geocoding.

One great use case for this service though: using mapbox, which is currently forbidden by Google's TOS...

While I'm stoked to see competition in this space, I wish the competition was a bit more robust (but everyone has gotta start some where, right?)

I hope you all continue forward with this, and hopefully add international capabilities as well as price drops. I for one would do away with your free offer altogether as the free users ROI will probably always be an expensive crap-fest and allocate those resources to driving the price down for your paying customers.

If/when you all can do ~1.1mil international geocodes per day for less than $10k a year, LET ME KNOW! :)

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#88

Just for those curious, it's not that cheap actually compared to Google's enterprise level Geocoding. Nor, I'm guessing, is it able to geocode internationally. In which case you might as well use Mapquest, as it's completely free. Currently, the company I work for uses Google for geocoding and we have 1.1mil a day which ends up costing around $5k (22%) per year more than these folks... but! It includes international…

Thanks for the feedback, it's really valuable! The idea behind Geocodio is definitely to prevent you from needing to go through the hassle of building a dataset yourself and hosting it, it is indeed a very time consuming process. Note that mapquest still has a 5k/requests per day limit [1] making this a viable alternative.

As mentioned in our FAQ [2] we do indeed provide special pricing and capacity for high-volume users, we would definitely be able to match Google's pricing by far.

[1] http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/dev-services/geoc... [2] http://geocod.io/faq/

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#89
Cool project. Like others have said, not particularly convinced that it's cheaper than Google's enterprise geocoding, but I'm more than glad to see the competition.

I wrote you guys a Ruby client: https://github.com/davidcelis/geocodio

The code's maybe a bit rough, but it's worked in my limited usage. Maybe you can take it for a test run before I push version 1.0.0 to RubyGems?

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#90

Just for those curious, it's not that cheap actually compared to Google's enterprise level Geocoding. Nor, I'm guessing, is it able to geocode internationally. In which case you might as well use Mapquest, as it's completely free. Currently, the company I work for uses Google for geocoding and we have 1.1mil a day which ends up costing around $5k (22%) per year more than these folks... but! It includes international…

Mapquest is free, but only up to 5k per day, right?
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