One thing that our application (processing real-estate data feeds) needs is the ability to figure out an approximate location if the address is a little vague.

One thing that our application (processing real-estate data feeds) needs is the ability to figure out an approximate location if the address is a little vague. For example, when we a vague address such as "Ichobod Crane Circle", we still want to get a position because that road is very short. However, if the address is something like "Sleepy Hollow Road" or "Murders Kill Road" (Coxsackie sure has some weird names), those are very long roads, and placing a marker anywhere on them would be meaningless. Google solves this for us by providing, in the results, the bounding box of the result. When the match is not "street_address" but something else such as "route", "premise", "point_of_interest" or the like, what we do is take the bounding_box, calculate the area, and use the area if it's less than 500x500 meters. It's not optimal, but it's better than having no location at all. Another thing that Google does semi-well is constrain the search to a specific area, like a country or a state. Unfortunately, Google doesn't let you pass in more than one state, but other than that, it works well. Some of the addresses we get are so vague that they would geocode to other countries (Oxford, England instead of Oxford, NY) if it were not for this filtering ability.