Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

224 点作者 thecodemonkey超过 11 年前

44 条评论

rubyn00bie超过 11 年前

Just for those curious, it's not that cheap actually compared to Google's enterprise level Geocoding. Nor, I'm guessing, is it able to geocode internationally. In which case you might as well use Mapquest, as it's completely free.Currently, the company I work for uses Google for geocoding and we have 1.1mil a day which ends up costing around $5k (22%) per year more than these folks... but! It includes international geocoding, google maps, etc.Simply using census data to Geocode US addresses is easy; and there are directions how to do it here in the comments... but setting up Nominatim (from open street maps) is a serious amount of effort (and not cheap for a 32GB server) but /is/ capable of global level geocoding.One great use case for this service though: using mapbox, which is currently forbidden by Google's TOS...While I'm stoked to see competition in this space, I wish the competition was a bit more robust (but everyone has gotta start some where, right?)I hope you all continue forward with this, and hopefully add international capabilities as well as price drops. I for one would do away with your free offer altogether as the free users ROI will probably always be an expensive crap-fest and allocate those resources to driving the price down for your paying customers.If/when you all can do ~1.1mil international geocodes per day for less than $10k a year, LET ME KNOW! :)

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joelverhagen超过 11 年前

Neat website! Very clean, simple pricing. Thank you for batch geocoding to minimize network traffic...How does the accuracy (as well as address parsing capabilities) compare to the completely free solutions such as Nominatim[1] or DSTK[2]?Both services provide capabilities for local installations, obviously with no query limits and minimal latency.[1] <a href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim</a>[2] <a href="http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/</a>

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dougmccune超过 11 年前

For those looking to roll your own, the Ruby implementation of a TIGER geocoder released by GeoIQ a while back is a pretty solid starting point: <a href="https://github.com/geocommons/geocoder/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/geocommons/geocoder/</a>We ended up using that as a base and then making some customizations for our US-based geocoding solution. As these guys are figuring out, there's no great int'l option. Google is bad from a licensing perspective (but their tech is fantastic). MapQuest is great but can get really expensive. We've had decent luck with TomTom I think, but if I remember correctly there are a lot of caveats.

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cjauvin超过 11 年前

I've been doing freelance geocoding gigs for a couple of institutions in the past years (canadian addresses), with only open source tools and data.I also wrote a primer explaining the basic geocoding ideas:<a href="http://cjauvin.blogspot.ca/2012/04/lean-geocoding.html" rel="nofollow">http://cjauvin.blogspot.ca/2012/04/lean-geocoding.html</a>

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lzhou超过 11 年前

For an API, you can also try <a href="http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/" rel="nofollow">http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/</a> (which is kinda free -- and uses OpenStreetMap data).The biggest problem we've had is changing non well-formed addresses / ambiguous addresses into canonical addresses with lat/lng. Google Maps wins on that front.

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jrheard超过 11 年前

UI suggestion: 'street addresses' currently has a box around it, so I thought it was an <input type="text"> field, thought "how cute", tried to click on it to enter an address to geocode, and was disappointed to find out it was just some bolded text. Might be a fun little feature to have that actually be an entry point into trying out a demo of the API (I thought I was supposed to enter an address to have geocoded).

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appleflaxen超过 11 年前

Your pricing page is not as clear as it could be.When people read "$0.001 each" they sometimes understand it to be one thousandth of a cent rather than one thousandth of a dollar.Even though you are completely correct/accurate, people find it confusing (1).Wouldn't it be clearer to say "1 cent fore every ten uses" (or "10 calls for a cent" or "a tenth of a penny per call")?Admittedly, your audience is semi-technical, and should parse it correctly, but why not simplify it?[1] <a href="http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/</a>

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stfp超过 11 年前

Congrats on the product! Just a couple website level things:- <a href="http://geocod.io/contact/" rel="nofollow">http://geocod.io/contact/</a> says DC but shows me a map centered somewhere south of Topeka.- Random $0.02 suggestion: stop using "ridiculous".

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mholt超过 11 年前

I work at SmartyStreets, where we've learned that geocoding is very, very difficult, so I definitely feel your pain! We started with basic Census Bureau stuff and it's definitely complicated, and accuracy can be spotty. (We've since worked with other data vendors to improve the accuracy.) It's too bad we don't all have little cars to roam the country with and manually collect rooftop-level data like Google does.+1 on the versioned API endpoint... when we released ours nearly 8 years ago, versioning APIs wasn't really a thing yet. We're paying that technical debt off now as we vigorously rewrite and improve our service.Quick feedback: Links on the FAQ page are hard to distinguish from regular text.Good luck with the project!

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thecodemonkey超过 11 年前

We were tired with dealing with the often steep pricing on geocoding when you reach your daily free limit (e.g. Google Maps starts at $10k/year). So I built this service so I can use it myself and hopefully it would be useful for others too.

Jemaclus超过 11 年前

Love it. I'll keep using my current service for now (SmartyStreets), but I'll let you know two things I noticed:1) Most services will accept shortcuts for names, like "SF" for San Francisco or NYC for New York, but in both cases, I got error messages instead of geocodes.2) Addresses that aren't "properly" formatted (i.e., without commas or something) often return very incorrect information. Here's an example:2680 NW 8th Pl, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33311 - returns correct info2680 NW 8th Pl Fort Lauderdale FL 33311 - returns incorrect info (see suffix, formatted_address)For what it's worth, SmartyStreets mangles even the first address that you got correct, but on the other hand, they're very good at correctly returning data for improperly formatted addresses like the second one.Anyway, good luck. Great tool.

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ColinWright超过 11 年前

Is it possible to delete an account? I created one before discovering it was US only.

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carlosdaniel超过 11 年前

Will your service be expanding to provide reverse geocoding? we would be interested if it did both (we need both).

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davidcelis超过 11 年前

Cool project. Like others have said, not particularly convinced that it's cheaper than Google's enterprise geocoding, but I'm more than glad to see the competition.I wrote you guys a Ruby client: <a href="https://github.com/davidcelis/geocodio" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/davidcelis/geocodio</a>The code's maybe a bit rough, but it's worked in my limited usage. Maybe you can take it for a test run before I push version 1.0.0 to RubyGems?

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rurabe超过 11 年前

I wonder how the "choose your own api key" policy is going to work in practice... given that people don't usually make very secure passwords and that the example is "Real estate website" you're going to get some pretty easy to guess api keys.

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suanmeiguo超过 11 年前

I tested this website api for 2000 randomly selected home address. And it's not accurate enough. It's 4000 foot away in average to google's lat lng. This number is kinda less accurate comparing to bing's 1000 and datasciencetoolkit is 2200.

brokenbeatnik超过 11 年前

Geocoda (<a href="http://geocoda.com" rel="nofollow">http://geocoda.com</a>) launched last year, does point storage as well as geocoding, and should be comparable for low amounts of geocoding, and cheaper for large amounts per month (> 250K).

pkh80超过 11 年前

TIGER (dataset that this is based on) has some giant holes in it, and is based on block faces not building footprints like Google Maps. Its also U.S. only... why not base on OSM, which should include TIGER as well as all the other contributions.

CalRobert超过 11 年前

Gah! This is awesome. Where were you when I was trying to get an idea launched and the cost of geocoding was the wall I kept hitting??? Seriously this makes my week, maybe it's time to dust off some old projects...

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joahua超过 11 年前

IIRC Google's TOS prohibits saving geocoded points. "Caching" is allowed, but I think this has value/is different insofar as it would let you store points permanently without breach of contract.

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matthuggins超过 11 年前

Where the pricing says $.001/ea for 2501+ geocodes, are the first 2500/day prior to that still free? Or am I paying $2.50 for the day as soon as I make that 1 extra request above the free limit?

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nl超过 11 年前

This is great.Also great is Pete Warden's <a href="http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/</a>Street Address to Coordinates: Street Address to Location calculates the latitude/longitude coordinates for a postal address. Currently only the US and UK have street-level detail.Google-style Geocoder: Are you currently using Google's geocoding API and want to switch? Replace maps.googleapis.com with the address of a DSTK server and your code should work without changes.Free to use, also available as a (free) self-hostable VM.

aabalkan超过 11 年前

Why don't you put a demo query page so I can try addresses in my country without signing up?edit: signed up. does not work outside us. Why not bother documenting that?

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ericd超过 11 年前

Neat! If you can get your address parsing up to Google's level or anywhere close, you should do quite well.For others looking for a solution you can play with yourself, here's a VM image with a pretty good geocoder you can set up yourself (iffy address parsing, though): <a href="http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org</a>

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basicallydan超过 11 年前

I really like the look of your API. I work a lot with location-based apps, I'll probably be giving this a go :)

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scrabble超过 11 年前

What's preventing people from simply signing up for Google Maps API for Business then sending your requests that way and returning the results?Thereby spreading out the bulk cost of an API license amongst your customers who have to pay a significantly smaller amount, but adding up to profit?

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chippy超过 11 年前

Also free <a href="http://geocoder.us/" rel="nofollow">http://geocoder.us/</a>

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3pt14159超过 11 年前

I oversaw a project like this elsewhere (where we had reams and reams of geo coordinates, but we needed text searchable tags (like "Canada", "Toronto", etc).We had millions of them though, so maybe an API isn't really the way to go.

kevingibbon超过 11 年前

How does the dataset compare to google? Would love to see some side by side comparisons.

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pitzips超过 11 年前

Would love if you could get integrated into <a href="http://www.rubygeocoder.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rubygeocoder.com/</a> - That would make my switch much easier. Would love to support you guys.

verelo超过 11 年前

I think this is great. We use Google Maps for geocoding today, we paid around 10k for this years license.If you guys can do the same without the rate limiting restrictions they place on us, we'd switch over in a heartbeat.

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snake_plissken超过 11 年前

Very cool. I'm in the telematics industry and forward geo-coding is something in which I am always interested, since it can be quite the bitch of a task. How did you go about assembling the shape files?

neovive超过 11 年前

Great to see something new in this space. I remember having to rewrite quite a bit of backend code when SimpleGeo shutdown.Note to self: code back-end API consumers with Interfaces and drivers instead of hardcoding API calls.

mmahemoff超过 11 年前

Small thing: I would drop the "bulk" as the tagline is too much of a mouthful and "bulk" is unnecessary. It's free at smaller volumes anyway, so certainly not deceptive to drop it.

nicolsc超过 11 年前

The ability to understant how the input was parsed is an interesting feature, but i think it'd better be optional.Most of the times users will only care about the results, so you'll be sending useless data

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beagle3超过 11 年前

Is there a similar service for reverse geocoding? US and international?

wikwocket超过 11 年前

Very nice! Can't wait to try it out.What does the "accuracy" value in the return mean? Maybe I am missing something but I don't see it in the FAQ or docs.

HillRat超过 11 年前

Great job, guys! This definitely opens up some nice options. Reminds me how much I miss the old TIGER/Line file formats, though.

jsumrall超过 11 年前

Interesting. What interesting things can you do once you geocode a street address? How are you (your business) using this?

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renegadedev超过 11 年前

I like the price point about $1/1000records. Just curious to hear how you arrived at this price point.

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vitalyny超过 11 年前

This is very cool! We use SmartyStreets because of the price. Where did you get the addresses database?

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martin1b超过 11 年前

Very nice. Pricing is very attractive. May need to use this in the future.

jaque超过 11 年前

so.. us addresses only?

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hydralist超过 11 年前

next up, geofencing-as-a-service?