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This is interesting but only seems to work to town/city level, is there any plans to go to street/full address level? I have used loqate.com for autocomplete o

This is interesting but only seems to work to town/city level, is there any plans to go to street/full address level? I have used loqate.com for autocomplete on store checkouts, but it not cheap. Always have my eye out for alternatives. I know it’s a difficult one to provide as, unlike in the US with zip codes being effectively public domain, in the UK the Post Code database is “owned” by Royal Mail. You have to pay them to access it or resell access to it, which is why Loqat is from 6p per lookup (this is 0.35p). There are a few “open source” database projects to recreate the Post Code geolocation lost but it’s not vary accurate or complete from previous experience. Hopefully one day Royal Mail will be nationalised again and someone there will decide, quite rightly, that it would be of national interest to make the Post Code database freely available.

drcongo 5y ago
Just in case it's not already on your radar, I've used http://postcodes.io http://postcodes.io before and found it very good.
- samwillis 5y ago
  Sadly that doesn’t include street addresses. The same people that created that also have ideal-postcodes.co.uk, similar to Loqat but a bit cheaper at ~3.5p a lookup. Will have a good play and see how accurate the postcodes seem as I’m assuming it’s using their postcodes.io db.
hattmall 5y ago
You are paying 35 cents per autocomplete on an ecmnmerce site? Is that correct? What would happen if a bot just started inputting random data?
timwis 5y ago
Have you looked at Ordnance Survey or ONSPD data? e.g. https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/code-point-open https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/product... There's also a service called MapIt which wraps it in an API you can host, and even provides a public instance for limited uses: https://mapit.mysociety.org/ https://mapit.mysociety.org/

drcongo 5y ago

Just in case it's not already on your radar, I've used http://postcodes.io http://postcodes.io before and found it very good.

samwillis 5y ago
Sadly that doesn’t include street addresses. The same people that created that also have ideal-postcodes.co.uk, similar to Loqat but a bit cheaper at ~3.5p a lookup. Will have a good play and see how accurate the postcodes seem as I’m assuming it’s using their postcodes.io db.

hattmall 5y ago

You are paying 35 cents per autocomplete on an ecmnmerce site? Is that correct? What would happen if a bot just started inputting random data?

timwis 5y ago

Have you looked at Ordnance Survey or ONSPD data? e.g. https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/code-point-open https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/product... There's also a service called MapIt which wraps it in an API you can host, and even provides a public instance for limited uses: https://mapit.mysociety.org/ https://mapit.mysociety.org/