Geocoding for free
Geocoding is the process of taking a location (like and address or city) and determining the latitude and longitude coordinates so that it can be displayed on a map or used for other purposes. Only a few years ago, it required an expensive service or a large custom database to provide this functionality. Today, we can build geocoders that are free and faster than ever.Our geocoder utilizes the Google or Yahoo geocoding service, which is free. But we also combine each geocoder with a built in cache to avoid the latency of doing the lookups from these remote services. Our caching system utilizes both good and bad cache lookup tables to determine if the input value has been retrieved before within a required amount of time. If so , the cached value is returned. Otherwise, a new lookup is performed and the result is then stored in the cache.
What this means is that geocoding is now a free service (once developed and installed) and you no longer need to subscribe to an expensive service to gain the functionality. A further benefit is that these services take in a single string of input, so the user can type whatever they want. The input may be a complete address, city, state zip, airport or other location. This is easier for the User than being required to type an address, move to the city field and enter a city, then move to the state field and select a state.