5 ms·

> The Mapbox Geocoding API does two things: forward geocoding and reverse geocoding. Forward geocoding converts location text into geographic coordinates, turni

> The Mapbox Geocoding API does two things: forward geocoding and reverse geocoding. Forward geocoding converts location text into geographic coordinates, turning 2 Lincoln Memorial Circle NW into -77.050,38.889. https://www.mapbox.com/place-search https://www.mapbox.com/place-search I think "location text" is the part they are not parsing well. The screenshots all over that page show someone entering a couple of letters and getting the resulting POI with address. Unfortunately, we could not get reliable results using their web place search so maybe they just have better mobile sdks that are adding more filter data to the requests automatically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

structural 6y ago
Their geocoding seems to work decently enough for street addresses from what I've seen, which is what it's technically advertised to do. It doesn't have a Google-sized database of business entities, so I'm not surprised it doesn't work for any POI less significant than a major landmark (i.e. "city hall", "the statue of liberty", etc.) Pretty common to use Google to look up an entity (to either get address or full geocoding results) and then Mapbox to do the display though.
et-al 6y ago
You're right, Mapbox does claim to search for businesses. If you're sticking with Mapbox, you'd probably need to a two-step lookup to obtain some useful results. 1. If there's no street address, check the search string to see if there's a city, or city, state. Find the lng,lat of that to use as the proximity bias. If nothing exists, use the user's current location. (Maybe this is why the mobile SDK is better.) 2. Then add the proximity bias while searching for the POI But just a heads up, even a simple city query can be problematic. From personal experience, "san jose" would return San Jose in Costa Rica, or San Jose City in the Philippines, and rarely San Jose, CA, US unless a user was to type all that. Google definitely has better NLP to handle user search queries.

structural 6y ago

Their geocoding seems to work decently enough for street addresses from what I've seen, which is what it's technically advertised to do. It doesn't have a Google-sized database of business entities, so I'm not surprised it doesn't work for any POI less significant than a major landmark (i.e. "city hall", "the statue of liberty", etc.) Pretty common to use Google to look up an entity (to either get address or full geocoding results) and then Mapbox to do the display though.

et-al 6y ago

You're right, Mapbox does claim to search for businesses. If you're sticking with Mapbox, you'd probably need to a two-step lookup to obtain some useful results. 1. If there's no street address, check the search string to see if there's a city, or city, state. Find the lng,lat of that to use as the proximity bias. If nothing exists, use the user's current location. (Maybe this is why the mobile SDK is better.) 2. Then add the proximity bias while searching for the POI But just a heads up, even a simple city query can be problematic. From personal experience, "san jose" would return San Jose in Costa Rica, or San Jose City in the Philippines, and rarely San Jose, CA, US unless a user was to type all that. Google definitely has better NLP to handle user search queries.