Geocoding Update
Friday, May 26th, 2006Here is an update on a previous posting regarding using Google maps and Geocoding APIs.
I had previously tried to use ontok to do my geocoding for a project that uses Google maps. As mentioned earlier I found ontok because I couldn’t get Yahoo’s geocoding API to work from my current webhost (Dreamhost).
Well, it turns out that ontok’s geocoding was inaccurate about 50% of the time at least for addresses in South Florida. So I revisited the Yahoo API. I still had the problem of not being able to use php’s file_get_contents() function on Dreamhost so I went back to trying to use cURL in order to call the Yahoo API.
In my research I found this resource at MapBuilder.net which provides a php script to call Yahoo’s geocoding API using cURL. As an added bonus it hooks up the API call via AJAX! I didn’t use the AJAX method for my project but it was very helpful for me to see some working code for the geocoding.
Next I hacked Phoogle (again!), this time getting it to work with Google Maps API v.2 as well as using the Yahoo cURL call for the geocoding.
Web 2.0 baby!

