8 ms·

LocationIQ — Free and Fast Geocoding Service

205 points by gopi_ar 10y ago

sherjilozair 10y ago
Are you using Meteor for this website?
emehrkay 10y ago
I love the "Get Started" section/workflow. I will copy it and look like a pretty creative person at work when I propose something similar. Thanks
- gopi_ar 10y ago
  Haha, sure. :-)
buro9 10y ago
Genuine question: What does this offer that http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/ http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/ doesn't? Today I use the MapQuest API, and it's been stable and fine for the 2+ years I've used it, and the search has always been very good, intuitively selecting the right entity... i.e. London, UK rather than London, OT, and finding the right lat:lon for pubs and not getting confused by other places with similar names.
- tomglynch 10y ago
  The home page looks more swank.
- lazyjones 10y ago
  At a quick first glance: MapQuest has 15K transactions/month for free, LocationIQ claims 30K/day currently.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Variety is a good thing. Make sure to pay close attention. MapQuest recently announced that they are going to discontinue their direct access OSM tile offering: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2016-June/076106.html https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2016-June/076... This is part of a ongoing reorganization of their offerings, it wouldn't be surprising if they flipped the switch on their other open data stuff.
  - nachtigall 10y ago
    Jeez, I had no idea that MapQuest will kill their free access. Thanks so much for sharing.
  - gopi_ar 10y ago
    This is actually why we had to setup our own servers in the first place!
    - buro9 10y ago
      Would you consider adjustments so that subjectively the most important place is returned? i.e. the London example I gave.
  - buro9 10y ago
    Cool, that's the missing bit of info I needed.
caleblloyd 10y ago
This is fantastic. I talked to Google for their geocoding API a couple years ago and was quoted $17,500 per year for a pretty basic package that included up to 10 requests per second and 100,000 geocodes per day if I remember correctly. I looked at hosting OSM myself but it seemed like a lot of work. Huge data files for the initial import and setting up daily increment jobs. Glad to see a managed service emerging!
- freyfogle 10y ago
  You may also enjoy: https://geocoder.opencagedata.com https://geocoder.opencagedata.com
- knz 10y ago
  If I recall correctly MapBox used to have better pricing when they first started. The government agency I worked for was quoted a reasonable rate per 1,000 addresses but the minimum required usage to use it was too prohibitive (paying tens of thousands even although the actual usage was < $1,000/year).
  - Cshelton 10y ago
    I think MapBox's rates are slightly better. To Store geocoded addresses, we pay ~$12,000/year I believe. That gets you like 1 million request/day I think. We also felt more comfortable with MapBox given Google's history of sudden api breaking changes... Also, our requirements had to have the geocoding be very accurate. MapBox and Google's geocoding results came out to be pretty much identical. About every other service, both free and paid, were not accurate enough.
    - knz 10y ago
      We were quoted 10M minimum geocodes @ $2.50/1,000 if we store any of the data. If my sleep deprived brain is doing that math correctly, the minimum buy would be $25,000/year. Our monthly geocode needs are ~ 5,000/month so the minimum per year is way out of align with our actual usage. Other than that it is a great product. I just wish their pricing for storing the data was more realistic.
FlyingSnake 10y ago
What's the caveat? How do they plan to keep the lights on? I hope they don't resort to dark patterns to keep afloat.
- gopi_ar 10y ago
  It's a value add anyway for our existing customers @ unwired labs. There's a lot of unused capacity though, so we thought why not give it away..
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  I see "free tier has these limits" - seems to imply there are paid tiers for higher usage.
danso 10y ago
FWIW, Mapzen also has been providing OSM-based geocoding at a rate of 30,000 a day, as well as reverse geo and routes: https://mapzen.com/documentation/search/ https://mapzen.com/documentation/search/ The advantage of OSM geocoding is that, unlikely Google Geocoder, there are no terms of service barring you from using the data on a non-Google product or for storing the data for your own use and analysis.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Mapzen also ingests data from OpenAddresses. (which for many regions will have much better coverage than OSM)
- rmc 10y ago
  > The advantage of OSM geocoding is that, unlikely Google Geocoder, there are no terms of service barring you from using the data on a non-Google product or for storing the data for your own use and analysis. Basically correct. However the OpenStreetMap licence (ODbL) may apply to geocoded data. So it might not be as simple as "no terms and conditions".
ionwake 10y ago
Sorry for the simple question here, but what would a person use this for? What is the use case? Thank you
- maxerickson 10y ago
  To geocode means to transform an address into a location. So say you have a textual address and want to know where it is located. You feed it into a geocoder and it returns a location. The same database can often be used to go the other direction, taking a location and returning the name and other details about a place.
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  Here's an actual workflow I have worked on: "I'm at 50.00000N, 15.00000E (a GPS coordinate). How do I get to the Foo Bar in Baz City (a text input or selection), by public transit (a choice of transport modes)?" - Reverse geocode "bus stop or train stop or tram stop near 50 N, 15 E" - "there's a bus stop named Xyzzy at 50.0012 N, 15.0003 E" - Geocode "Foo Bar, Baz City" - "51 N, 14 E" - Reverse geocode "bus stop or train stop or tram stop near 51 N, 14 E" - "there's a train station named Baz City Central at 50.99998 N, 14.001 E" (plus routing and scheduling on top of that - but that is beyond the scope of geocoding, which is one part of the toolchain) Other example: "I'm at 50 N, 15 E; get me a list of restaurants around here" (optionally: non-smoking, currently open - not sure if Nominatim directly supports filtering like that)
  - ionwake 10y ago
    Thank you for the detailed reply. I understand it would be normally used for an app which provides travel planning abilities now.
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      That is one of the possible uses, indeed; I'm pretty sure someone else has used it in a more creative way :)
- jackmaney 10y ago
buckhx 10y ago
I'm glad to see more geocoding offerings, but if you need more than a few thousand addresses, you'll find no offering will. Running your own geocoding really shouldn't be that scary of thing to do. The biggest pain in running your own OSM geocoder (nominatim) is kind of a bear to set up. I imagine there docker images that could make things a bit easier and allow you to grab a region extract, but I could be wrong there. On a side note, I was working on an open source geocoder based on OSM that was easy to build as part of a mapping util I've been working on (https://github.com/buckhx/diglet https://github.com/buckhx/diglet). I lost some traction on the geocoding side of things and have been focusing more on map building/serving, but did get a stable version for US addresses. There are lot's of interesting problems that come along with geocoding.
- freyfogle 10y ago
  Not sure about your first sentence. I'm founder of the OpenCage geocoder, we'll gladly work with anyone large or small, we have clients doing millions of requests per day. We use OpenStreetMap but also other open geo data sets. https://geocoder.opencagedata.com https://geocoder.opencagedata.com
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Looks pretty good. We currently use Google but would love to switch. One thing our app needs is a way to only get street address matches. Basically, I already know that an address is a street address or at least a very small side road. It's not an entire county or city, and never a very long road like a highway. Google lets me filter out such bogus results by returning a "bounds" field in the results. Using this bounding box I can calculate the area, and ignore anything less than 200x200m, regardless of the type of feature returned (which is sometimes a "route" even though it's very small). I see your API returns a "bounds" in the results, but it's not documented. Is that what it's for? I'm also looking for a good autocompleter. Basically, if my app is about Montana, then the user should be able to type "M" and get "Missoula" as the top hit within 50ms. Not Mississippi or Montreal or anything outside Montana. It should also be possible to misspell names, type partial street addresses and so on. Google's geocoding API is useless for this since it doesn't do fuzzy matching. They have an API called Google Places, but it has restrictions and doesn't seem designed exactly for this stuff.
karussell 10y ago
Kind of funny that they trust Google Maps more for their contact page ;) https://unwiredlabs.com/contact https://unwiredlabs.com/contact
- mtmail 10y ago
  I'm more worried that OpenStreetMap is misspelled several times and the OSM license listed as CC-BY while it should be ODbL (http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright).
  - gopi_ar 10y ago
    We'll check that out right away, thanks!
    - mtmail 10y ago
      I need to correct myself. The license in the footer references the map tiles in the background. Those were created from pre-2012 data and at that point OpenStreetMap still using the CC-YA license.
scotchio 10y ago
Geocodio [1] is another really good service to look into too: * Good free and premium paid service * They've gone a bit above and beyond to provide examples/demos in all languages in their docs. Super easy for users * Can process bulk/batch request super fast in parallel on your behalf * Have a super cool front-end CSV upload tool built in React so non-programmers can geocode data in seconds * Forward/reverse geocoding * Also give Census data, congressional districts, state legislative districts, and even school districts Full disclosure: I know the husband and wife founder. Very nice people [1]: https://geocod.io https://geocod.io
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  USA and Canada only :( Ah well, can't have everything.
- TimMeade 10y ago
  Excellent pricing on this. But i just ran my house on it and it was off by 10 houses while proclaiming perfect accuracy. The Google answer was exact. The other party was off by 1 house. Is this because of the underlying data from OSM?
  - thecodemonkey 10y ago
    Hi Tim. Mathias from geocod.io here. Can you please drop us a line at hello AT geocod.io would love to look into what happened there. We're using Tiger/Line and Rooftop-level (through OpenAddresses) datasets under the hood. We do not use OSM as it's generally not optimized for geocoding.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      It's a little odd to mention Tiger/Line and optimized for geocoding in the same sentence. Tiger/Line is specifically obscured to protect the anonymity of individuals that live in low density areas. It's de-optimized for geocoding before it is published for public access. It seems pretty likely that's the issue above. Of course OSM is not a great source of addresses either, as it simply doesn't have data for so many regions.
kylehotchkiss 10y ago
Cool! Google's is super-cheap (would rather pay for one for client needs - feel like paid-for means it'll be around for the long term) but would be cool to use this on personal project Just saw the company is Hyderabad based too, I always enjoy seeing new Indian startups on the radar!
- gopi_ar 10y ago
  This actually started out as a free-offering for our customers once MapquestOpen started charging unreasonably. Our devs put up LocationIQ as a standalone project that we expect to support fully for a long time to come. Thanks for your wishes!
oolongCat 10y ago
Is there a specific format for an address to work? For instance on locationiq.org Department of Food Safety and Zoonoses (FOS) World Health Organization Avenue Appia 20 Geneva Does not work. On maps.google Department of Food Safety and Zoonoses (FOS) World Health Organization Avenue Appia 20 Geneva Doen't work but World Health Organization Avenue Appia 20. CH-1211 Geneva 27 works on google.
- sgnelson 10y ago
  At least for the US, you can check out USPS CASS. I can't tell you about the rest of the world, but I'd bet bet that the EU has something similar.
ancymon 10y ago
Are they are just running Nominatim? Is Nominatim reliable? Looking at Nominatim project on github it does not look like well maintained software (e.g. there is even pull request from 2012, issues with basic use cases)...
- gopi_ar 10y ago
  We use a more stable version of Nominatim internally and pushed that out with locationIQ. :-)
- rmc 10y ago
  Nominatim is actively developed, and in active use by many organisations to handle large load. It is reliable.
rmc 10y ago
Geofabrik also provides OpenStreetMap based Nominatim geocoding as a service, and can set it up for you on your own machine if you want. http://www.geofabrik.de/services/server.html http://www.geofabrik.de/services/server.html
r1ch 10y ago
Would like to see this default to HTTPS. Addresses can often reveal lots of personal information.
sgnelson 10y ago
Wow, I had no idea that Geocoding was so big around here, nice to see. So a question for all of you geocoders, how are you testing and determining accuracy? ie, how many "failed to geocode records" out of an arbitrary number could I expect given that the address is properly formatted? By the way, (again, at least for the US), the best (fastest, very accurate) geocoder I've ever used was created by Alteryx. I've always been curious if it's actually their own geocoder, or they are using another service in the background. (edited to add: though of course, this is for Alteryx's proprietary system, and though it provides decent ways to get the data in/out, it's not simply a plug and play system if you're writing your own software.) ESRI's is one of the worst; relatively slow, not all that accurate and worst of all (at least this was the case) it'll choke on anything over 300,000 records.
- freyfogle 10y ago
  Hi, co-founder of the OpenCage Geocoder here. I can't speak to the opinions of others, but for me your question is a lot like asking "what's the best programming language?" The only realistic answer is that it depends on your task. We're continually facing new customer requirements, and what one customer thinks is absolutely essential, the next guy couldn't care less about. A good example is speed. For some clients every millisecond is critical (imagine real time bidding systems), for others they are running a batch process to geocode their database in the middle of the night and couldn't care less if it takes one hour or two. Likewise huge differences in requirements in terms of accuracy. Some clients will accept only perfection, meanwhile the next guy intentionally wants a vague answer so that consumer privacy is maintained. Then obviously there are big differences across countries, forward and reverse, etc, etc. Some clients must have the attributes that using an open data source like OpenStreetMap allows, others care only about price. So there is almost certainly a perfect answer for your specific geocoding needs, but there is no perfect geocoder.
  - sgnelson 10y ago
    Thanks for replying, your data sources are amazing, it must have taken quite a bit of work to put them all together. And I get that different users have different needs, but I'm still curious about the accuracy (it's geography after all, I don't care how fast the results are returned if they're wrong.) And especially given the multi-data sets that OpenCage uses, how do you know that you're returning the right results? (obviously there is the spatial aspect, ie, within 100 yards of the true location; but I'm most curious about the percentage of returned address with a greater than 90% probability of being the "correct" address.) I wouldn't expect it from most geocoder services, but that's what "ground truthing" is for.And what happens if you happen to come across conflicting results when you're using the multiple data sets? So again, all these new geocoders provide some nice services, but how are they measuring their accuracy of results? I could also shrink this question down to a business question, what makes your service better versus all the others? Who can prove to me that they provide the "best" (most accurate) results? (I'm not in the market, sorry, it's a hypothetical.)
infinitone 10y ago
When i run the example of 'Statue of Liberty', i get an array of various places of the statue (didn't know theres one in Pakistan). Then i put 'Statue of Liberty, New York' and i get an empty array. Am i missing something here?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  No it's a bug or data error. The query is "explained" here: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=Statue+of+Liberty&polygon=1&viewbox= http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=Statue+of+Li... Note that it places the statue in New Jersey. So it isn't properly handing the fact that Liberty Island is an exclave of New York (so most likely a bug).
jdfx 10y ago
Nothing I have found so far provides the accuracy and data of http://opencagedata.com/ http://opencagedata.com/ And i've searched everywhere.
- jdfx 10y ago
  Other geocoders and lots and lots of open data. There's Nominatim, Data Science Toolkit and the Two Fishes geocoders. All of this is built on open geospatial data including OpenStreetMap, Yahoo! GeoPlanet, Natural Earth Data, Thematic Mapping, Ordnance Survey OpenSpace, Statistics New Zealand, Zillow, MaxMind, GeoNames, the US Census Bureau and Flickr's shapefiles plus a whole lot more besides. Here's the full list of datasources. https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/credits https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/credits I am about to use this for a project so thought I would recommend the find when I saw this post.
nagarjun 10y ago
This looks awesome! Is there also a places autocomplete API?
- darkstar999 10y ago
  No.

205 points by gopi_ar 10y ago

Are you using Meteor for this website?

I love the "Get Started" section/workflow. I will copy it and look like a pretty creative person at work when I propose something similar. Thanks

gopi_ar 10y ago
Haha, sure. :-)

buro9 10y ago

Genuine question: What does this offer that http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/ http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/ doesn't? Today I use the MapQuest API, and it's been stable and fine for the 2+ years I've used it, and the search has always been very good, intuitively selecting the right entity... i.e. London, UK rather than London, OT, and finding the right lat:lon for pubs and not getting confused by other places with similar names.

tomglynch 10y ago
The home page looks more swank.
lazyjones 10y ago
At a quick first glance: MapQuest has 15K transactions/month for free, LocationIQ claims 30K/day currently.
maxerickson 10y ago
Variety is a good thing. Make sure to pay close attention. MapQuest recently announced that they are going to discontinue their direct access OSM tile offering: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2016-June/076106.html https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2016-June/076... This is part of a ongoing reorganization of their offerings, it wouldn't be surprising if they flipped the switch on their other open data stuff.
- nachtigall 10y ago
  Jeez, I had no idea that MapQuest will kill their free access. Thanks so much for sharing.
- gopi_ar 10y ago
  This is actually why we had to setup our own servers in the first place!
  - buro9 10y ago
    Would you consider adjustments so that subjectively the most important place is returned? i.e. the London example I gave.
- buro9 10y ago
  Cool, that's the missing bit of info I needed.

caleblloyd 10y ago

This is fantastic. I talked to Google for their geocoding API a couple years ago and was quoted $17,500 per year for a pretty basic package that included up to 10 requests per second and 100,000 geocodes per day if I remember correctly. I looked at hosting OSM myself but it seemed like a lot of work. Huge data files for the initial import and setting up daily increment jobs. Glad to see a managed service emerging!

freyfogle 10y ago
You may also enjoy: https://geocoder.opencagedata.com https://geocoder.opencagedata.com
knz 10y ago
If I recall correctly MapBox used to have better pricing when they first started. The government agency I worked for was quoted a reasonable rate per 1,000 addresses but the minimum required usage to use it was too prohibitive (paying tens of thousands even although the actual usage was < $1,000/year).
- Cshelton 10y ago
  I think MapBox's rates are slightly better. To Store geocoded addresses, we pay ~$12,000/year I believe. That gets you like 1 million request/day I think. We also felt more comfortable with MapBox given Google's history of sudden api breaking changes... Also, our requirements had to have the geocoding be very accurate. MapBox and Google's geocoding results came out to be pretty much identical. About every other service, both free and paid, were not accurate enough.
  - knz 10y ago
    We were quoted 10M minimum geocodes @ $2.50/1,000 if we store any of the data. If my sleep deprived brain is doing that math correctly, the minimum buy would be $25,000/year. Our monthly geocode needs are ~ 5,000/month so the minimum per year is way out of align with our actual usage. Other than that it is a great product. I just wish their pricing for storing the data was more realistic.

FlyingSnake 10y ago

What's the caveat? How do they plan to keep the lights on? I hope they don't resort to dark patterns to keep afloat.

gopi_ar 10y ago
It's a value add anyway for our existing customers @ unwired labs. There's a lot of unused capacity though, so we thought why not give it away..
Piskvorrr 10y ago
I see "free tier has these limits" - seems to imply there are paid tiers for higher usage.

danso 10y ago

FWIW, Mapzen also has been providing OSM-based geocoding at a rate of 30,000 a day, as well as reverse geo and routes: https://mapzen.com/documentation/search/ https://mapzen.com/documentation/search/ The advantage of OSM geocoding is that, unlikely Google Geocoder, there are no terms of service barring you from using the data on a non-Google product or for storing the data for your own use and analysis.

maxerickson 10y ago
Mapzen also ingests data from OpenAddresses. (which for many regions will have much better coverage than OSM)
rmc 10y ago
> The advantage of OSM geocoding is that, unlikely Google Geocoder, there are no terms of service barring you from using the data on a non-Google product or for storing the data for your own use and analysis. Basically correct. However the OpenStreetMap licence (ODbL) may apply to geocoded data. So it might not be as simple as "no terms and conditions".

ionwake 10y ago

Sorry for the simple question here, but what would a person use this for? What is the use case? Thank you

maxerickson 10y ago
To geocode means to transform an address into a location. So say you have a textual address and want to know where it is located. You feed it into a geocoder and it returns a location. The same database can often be used to go the other direction, taking a location and returning the name and other details about a place.
Piskvorrr 10y ago
Here's an actual workflow I have worked on: "I'm at 50.00000N, 15.00000E (a GPS coordinate). How do I get to the Foo Bar in Baz City (a text input or selection), by public transit (a choice of transport modes)?" - Reverse geocode "bus stop or train stop or tram stop near 50 N, 15 E" - "there's a bus stop named Xyzzy at 50.0012 N, 15.0003 E" - Geocode "Foo Bar, Baz City" - "51 N, 14 E" - Reverse geocode "bus stop or train stop or tram stop near 51 N, 14 E" - "there's a train station named Baz City Central at 50.99998 N, 14.001 E" (plus routing and scheduling on top of that - but that is beyond the scope of geocoding, which is one part of the toolchain) Other example: "I'm at 50 N, 15 E; get me a list of restaurants around here" (optionally: non-smoking, currently open - not sure if Nominatim directly supports filtering like that)
- ionwake 10y ago
  Thank you for the detailed reply. I understand it would be normally used for an app which provides travel planning abilities now.
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    That is one of the possible uses, indeed; I'm pretty sure someone else has used it in a more creative way :)
jackmaney 10y ago

buckhx 10y ago

I'm glad to see more geocoding offerings, but if you need more than a few thousand addresses, you'll find no offering will. Running your own geocoding really shouldn't be that scary of thing to do. The biggest pain in running your own OSM geocoder (nominatim) is kind of a bear to set up. I imagine there docker images that could make things a bit easier and allow you to grab a region extract, but I could be wrong there. On a side note, I was working on an open source geocoder based on OSM that was easy to build as part of a mapping util I've been working on (https://github.com/buckhx/diglet https://github.com/buckhx/diglet). I lost some traction on the geocoding side of things and have been focusing more on map building/serving, but did get a stable version for US addresses. There are lot's of interesting problems that come along with geocoding.

freyfogle 10y ago
Not sure about your first sentence. I'm founder of the OpenCage geocoder, we'll gladly work with anyone large or small, we have clients doing millions of requests per day. We use OpenStreetMap but also other open geo data sets. https://geocoder.opencagedata.com https://geocoder.opencagedata.com
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Looks pretty good. We currently use Google but would love to switch. One thing our app needs is a way to only get street address matches. Basically, I already know that an address is a street address or at least a very small side road. It's not an entire county or city, and never a very long road like a highway. Google lets me filter out such bogus results by returning a "bounds" field in the results. Using this bounding box I can calculate the area, and ignore anything less than 200x200m, regardless of the type of feature returned (which is sometimes a "route" even though it's very small). I see your API returns a "bounds" in the results, but it's not documented. Is that what it's for? I'm also looking for a good autocompleter. Basically, if my app is about Montana, then the user should be able to type "M" and get "Missoula" as the top hit within 50ms. Not Mississippi or Montreal or anything outside Montana. It should also be possible to misspell names, type partial street addresses and so on. Google's geocoding API is useless for this since it doesn't do fuzzy matching. They have an API called Google Places, but it has restrictions and doesn't seem designed exactly for this stuff.

karussell 10y ago

Kind of funny that they trust Google Maps more for their contact page ;) https://unwiredlabs.com/contact https://unwiredlabs.com/contact

mtmail 10y ago
I'm more worried that OpenStreetMap is misspelled several times and the OSM license listed as CC-BY while it should be ODbL (http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright).
- gopi_ar 10y ago
  We'll check that out right away, thanks!
  - mtmail 10y ago
    I need to correct myself. The license in the footer references the map tiles in the background. Those were created from pre-2012 data and at that point OpenStreetMap still using the CC-YA license.

scotchio 10y ago

Geocodio [1] is another really good service to look into too: * Good free and premium paid service * They've gone a bit above and beyond to provide examples/demos in all languages in their docs. Super easy for users * Can process bulk/batch request super fast in parallel on your behalf * Have a super cool front-end CSV upload tool built in React so non-programmers can geocode data in seconds * Forward/reverse geocoding * Also give Census data, congressional districts, state legislative districts, and even school districts Full disclosure: I know the husband and wife founder. Very nice people [1]: https://geocod.io https://geocod.io

Piskvorrr 10y ago
USA and Canada only :( Ah well, can't have everything.
TimMeade 10y ago
Excellent pricing on this. But i just ran my house on it and it was off by 10 houses while proclaiming perfect accuracy. The Google answer was exact. The other party was off by 1 house. Is this because of the underlying data from OSM?
- thecodemonkey 10y ago
  Hi Tim. Mathias from geocod.io here. Can you please drop us a line at hello AT geocod.io would love to look into what happened there. We're using Tiger/Line and Rooftop-level (through OpenAddresses) datasets under the hood. We do not use OSM as it's generally not optimized for geocoding.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    It's a little odd to mention Tiger/Line and optimized for geocoding in the same sentence. Tiger/Line is specifically obscured to protect the anonymity of individuals that live in low density areas. It's de-optimized for geocoding before it is published for public access. It seems pretty likely that's the issue above. Of course OSM is not a great source of addresses either, as it simply doesn't have data for so many regions.

kylehotchkiss 10y ago

Cool! Google's is super-cheap (would rather pay for one for client needs - feel like paid-for means it'll be around for the long term) but would be cool to use this on personal project Just saw the company is Hyderabad based too, I always enjoy seeing new Indian startups on the radar!

gopi_ar 10y ago
This actually started out as a free-offering for our customers once MapquestOpen started charging unreasonably. Our devs put up LocationIQ as a standalone project that we expect to support fully for a long time to come. Thanks for your wishes!

oolongCat 10y ago

Is there a specific format for an address to work? For instance on locationiq.org Department of Food Safety and Zoonoses (FOS) World Health Organization Avenue Appia 20 Geneva Does not work. On maps.google Department of Food Safety and Zoonoses (FOS) World Health Organization Avenue Appia 20 Geneva Doen't work but World Health Organization Avenue Appia 20. CH-1211 Geneva 27 works on google.

sgnelson 10y ago
At least for the US, you can check out USPS CASS. I can't tell you about the rest of the world, but I'd bet bet that the EU has something similar.

ancymon 10y ago

Are they are just running Nominatim? Is Nominatim reliable? Looking at Nominatim project on github it does not look like well maintained software (e.g. there is even pull request from 2012, issues with basic use cases)...

gopi_ar 10y ago
We use a more stable version of Nominatim internally and pushed that out with locationIQ. :-)
rmc 10y ago
Nominatim is actively developed, and in active use by many organisations to handle large load. It is reliable.

rmc 10y ago

Geofabrik also provides OpenStreetMap based Nominatim geocoding as a service, and can set it up for you on your own machine if you want. http://www.geofabrik.de/services/server.html http://www.geofabrik.de/services/server.html

r1ch 10y ago

Would like to see this default to HTTPS. Addresses can often reveal lots of personal information.

sgnelson 10y ago

Wow, I had no idea that Geocoding was so big around here, nice to see. So a question for all of you geocoders, how are you testing and determining accuracy? ie, how many "failed to geocode records" out of an arbitrary number could I expect given that the address is properly formatted? By the way, (again, at least for the US), the best (fastest, very accurate) geocoder I've ever used was created by Alteryx. I've always been curious if it's actually their own geocoder, or they are using another service in the background. (edited to add: though of course, this is for Alteryx's proprietary system, and though it provides decent ways to get the data in/out, it's not simply a plug and play system if you're writing your own software.) ESRI's is one of the worst; relatively slow, not all that accurate and worst of all (at least this was the case) it'll choke on anything over 300,000 records.

freyfogle 10y ago
Hi, co-founder of the OpenCage Geocoder here. I can't speak to the opinions of others, but for me your question is a lot like asking "what's the best programming language?" The only realistic answer is that it depends on your task. We're continually facing new customer requirements, and what one customer thinks is absolutely essential, the next guy couldn't care less about. A good example is speed. For some clients every millisecond is critical (imagine real time bidding systems), for others they are running a batch process to geocode their database in the middle of the night and couldn't care less if it takes one hour or two. Likewise huge differences in requirements in terms of accuracy. Some clients will accept only perfection, meanwhile the next guy intentionally wants a vague answer so that consumer privacy is maintained. Then obviously there are big differences across countries, forward and reverse, etc, etc. Some clients must have the attributes that using an open data source like OpenStreetMap allows, others care only about price. So there is almost certainly a perfect answer for your specific geocoding needs, but there is no perfect geocoder.
- sgnelson 10y ago
  Thanks for replying, your data sources are amazing, it must have taken quite a bit of work to put them all together. And I get that different users have different needs, but I'm still curious about the accuracy (it's geography after all, I don't care how fast the results are returned if they're wrong.) And especially given the multi-data sets that OpenCage uses, how do you know that you're returning the right results? (obviously there is the spatial aspect, ie, within 100 yards of the true location; but I'm most curious about the percentage of returned address with a greater than 90% probability of being the "correct" address.) I wouldn't expect it from most geocoder services, but that's what "ground truthing" is for.And what happens if you happen to come across conflicting results when you're using the multiple data sets? So again, all these new geocoders provide some nice services, but how are they measuring their accuracy of results? I could also shrink this question down to a business question, what makes your service better versus all the others? Who can prove to me that they provide the "best" (most accurate) results? (I'm not in the market, sorry, it's a hypothetical.)

infinitone 10y ago

When i run the example of 'Statue of Liberty', i get an array of various places of the statue (didn't know theres one in Pakistan). Then i put 'Statue of Liberty, New York' and i get an empty array. Am i missing something here?

maxerickson 10y ago
No it's a bug or data error. The query is "explained" here: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=Statue+of+Liberty&polygon=1&viewbox= http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=Statue+of+Li... Note that it places the statue in New Jersey. So it isn't properly handing the fact that Liberty Island is an exclave of New York (so most likely a bug).

jdfx 10y ago

Nothing I have found so far provides the accuracy and data of http://opencagedata.com/ http://opencagedata.com/ And i've searched everywhere.

jdfx 10y ago
Other geocoders and lots and lots of open data. There's Nominatim, Data Science Toolkit and the Two Fishes geocoders. All of this is built on open geospatial data including OpenStreetMap, Yahoo! GeoPlanet, Natural Earth Data, Thematic Mapping, Ordnance Survey OpenSpace, Statistics New Zealand, Zillow, MaxMind, GeoNames, the US Census Bureau and Flickr's shapefiles plus a whole lot more besides. Here's the full list of datasources. https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/credits https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/credits I am about to use this for a project so thought I would recommend the find when I saw this post.

nagarjun 10y ago

This looks awesome! Is there also a places autocomplete API?

darkstar999 10y ago
No.