Yay, geocoding! Many years ago I worked for Vicinity Corp., an early maps-on-the-Internet startup (who made the MapBlast site and was the original provider of

Yay, geocoding! Many years ago I worked for Vicinity Corp., an early maps-on-the-Internet startup (who made the MapBlast site and was the original provider of Yahoo Maps, but was eventually smashed by MapQuest and later Google Maps). Along with Eddie Babcock (one of the many Vicinity people who came from Atari), I worked mostly on the geocoder portion of the site. It was as fun and interesting as this post makes it sound, with lots of algorithmic work and special cases to make some sort of "human sense" out of the map line data (provided by Etak at the time) and POI database (we had multiple providers for this, a lot of the work I did was creating a unified API into all the different providers). It is kind of amazing to consider how ubiquitous this technology is now, and almost difficult to remember what it was like (though it wasn't long ago!) when I didn't have a constantly updated map of virtually the entire world in my pocket.