
Show HN: Geocoding API built with government open data - evanmarks
https://latlon.io
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evanmarks
I've been working on a side project that needs to geocode a large amount of
addresses, so as a tangent I built this geocoding API over the past month. The
state of open source geocoding tools is pretty amazing, especially if you only
need to geocode addresses in the US.

I explored Nominatim, which uses Open Street Map data, and PostGIS before
settling on PostGIS. Nominatim has the ability to geocode international
addresses, which is a huge plus, but it runs as a standalone web service and
its address parser seemed to have trouble with many addresses that PostGIS
handled well. PostGIS can be setup with the US census Tiger/Line data to cover
the entire country and runs directly in the database which gives quite a
performance boost.

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augustflanagan
Nice work! I really like the minimal homepage.

One small suggestion, when someone clicks the 'Try It' button and it scrolls
to the address input have it focus the input for the user.

I've actually been needing the exact opposite of this tool lately. I have a
bunch of lat lon pairs that I need turned into addresses. Any plans to add
reverse geocoding any time soon?

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evanmarks
The input focus would be a good usability upgrade - thanks. It does actually
do reverse geocoding as well, but there is not "try-it" feature for that part
of the API yet. The docs for that functionality are here -
[https://latlon.io/documentation#reverse-
geocode](https://latlon.io/documentation#reverse-geocode). What specific type
of info are you looking to get when turning those lat/lon pairs into
addresses?

~~~
augustflanagan
Oh nice, I guess I didn't get that far in the docs. Actually, for my use case
this would be perfect. I just need the city, state and zip.

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crisopolis
Tell me the difference between this service and Google Geocoding, OpenCage, or
OpenStreetMap?

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evanmarks
There are 3 broad groups of geocoding services out there.

1\. Free tier with only a few allowed uses (and enterprise access starting in
the 5 figures). Google maps falls into this category as in the free tier you
can only use the geocoding results to display points on a Google Map that is
freely accessible. Google obviously has great results and is worldwide.

2\. Open to everyone but rate limited. This is where Nominatim/Open Street Map
falls. They have coverage worldwide and you can freely access the API, but
with only 1 request per second. I also found that they could not find results
for quite a few addresses I tested which were returned easily by other
services.

3\. Paid API with no restrictions on use. This is where LatLon.io falls and
Opencage as well. They look to have a pretty good product and will be a good
competitor!

