Phillip Holmstrand has put together a very interesting site that allows you batch geocode addresses in your browser. He’s using the Yahoo! Maps API to geocode address you can pretty much just copy and paste out of any spreadsheet. I love how its so easy to use, no longer will you have to pay people money to geocode addresses as just about anyone can use it. Best of all it uses REST so there is no reloading your browser window while you perform the tasks. Its a great idea with a wonderful interface.
7 responses so far ↓
1
Andrew Theken
// Jan 22, 2006 at 12:26 pm
I also have utilized the Yahoo! Geocoder, in a PHP Google Maps class (LGPL’d on my site). Can anybody expand on if this is inside the Yahoo! TOS? I hope so, but am not completely sure.
2
Phillip Holmstrand
// Jan 23, 2006 at 2:16 pm
Andrew -
I think as long as you keep things accessible from the general public and not for charge, it is not in violation of the TOS. That said I am surprised how liberal Yahoo is with their imposed limits on the geocoding service.
Even if you are only accessing from one IP (which my service doesn’t, it uses the end-user IP so each user is different) you are still allowed 50,000 requests per day. And it doesn’t put artificial delays in the request like geocoder.us … for geocoder.us you are only allowed one query every 10 seconds. Yahoo seems to go as fast as you can throw it at it.
Hopefully they keep it that way, as I am really enjoying the possibilities!
Cheers,
-Phillip
3
Rich Gibson
// Jan 24, 2006 at 3:25 pm
geocoder.us does throttle requests. But it also lets you download the code and data and run your own server.
4
Phillip Holmstrand
// Jan 24, 2006 at 4:18 pm
Actually I think the biggest problem with geocoder.us isn’t necessarily that they throttle requests, but that the data is TIGER, which is not near the quality as the NAVTEQ data that Yahoo is based on. TIGER is just OK, I’ve heard reports of geocodes being several hundred feet off in some areas because of it.
At work we pay big bucks for Navteq data because its really good, in some ways it provides better coverage than our own centerline data because it tracks aliases much better.
5 IndependentSource.org » Google Maps // Feb 18, 2006 at 4:31 am
[...] I decided to test out the Google Maps API because I work on a project at work that is well suited for it. I thought it would be fun to play around with it on my personal site too. Heck, maybe I’ll even put one on here. Anyway, you have to use a 3rd party geocoder as I understand it. The name that comes up most often for that is http://geocoder.us/ and I like to follow the path of least resistance, so I checked them out. Within minutes I had a very simple implementation put together. The maps look pretty tight on my site. The geocoder web service was intuitive, but my results have all been approximately 100 feet off. I’ve checked out every address where I’ve resided in the last 34 years. My point is always in the neighbors backyard or across the street. Did I say a 100 feet? Well, it’s really close anyway, so I know I’m doing at least 1 thing correctly. I have googled it a little and found a post where a guy who sounds like he knows what he’s talking about mentions a similar issue. Apparently geocoder.us is based on TIGER and NAVTEQ is more accurate. Lil’ Nicky, who originally got me thinking about the joy of mapping, first suggested Google Maps, but then later urged me to try out Yahoo! instead. Maybe I will get better results that way. I think I’ll try that out next. Perhaps my relatively tight circle here in Orange County is particularly difficult to geocode. I should probably just go back to bed, it’s 3:30 AM, but I had to come downstairs and see if rounding the long and lat the same way they appear on the geocoder web site would help. It didn’t. Anywho… [...]
6
Giri
// Jun 16, 2008 at 5:17 am
at present batcgeocode.com is not workign it seems.. can anyone jus leave a comment why its not working and how is it possible to make it work. the browser shows error like Ysize is undefined when we try to run the geocoder.
7
Xun
// Jun 27, 2008 at 8:08 am
It is a great resource for batch geocoding. However, to use it programmatially, or to using it on the fly, say, you want to catpture the address list of a web page and map it day by day, the above service would be too tedious. So why not programmatically do batch geocoding and save the result into a xml document and use it in your map service? This article attempts to solve the problem, check it out
The wild wide web for mapping
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/The-wild-wide-web-for-mapping.aspx
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