Batch Geocode Tabular Address Data via Your Web Browser
January 20, 2006 7 Comments
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.
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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.
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
geocoder.us does throttle requests. But it also lets you download the code and data and run your own server.
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.
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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.
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