NYCPHP Meetup

[Matt Juszczak]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, John Corry wrote:

> Attn: cross posted to ATLPHP
>
> I am working on a project that will require running about 3500 street
> addresses through a geocoder application to return lat/long pairs.
>
> My first idea was to use cURL to post the address to the http://geocoder.us/
> site...once for each address, parsing the returned result to get lat/long
> and store those with the address record in my db.
>
> I haven't tried it yet because a quiet but persistent voice is whispering to
> me that looping through 3500 records and opening a cURL session to another
> website to screen-scrape the results is somehow not a good idea...for my
> server or theirs. I don't know enough about all of the issues to be able to
> articulate why (perhaps you want to enlighten me)...just that it seems like
> a bad idea.
>
> Does anyone know a better way? I can't pay for a commercial service for this
> but if there's a faster, more efficient means of usign the free services
> available I'd appreciate hearing about it.
>
> Thanks,
> John Corry

I actually use geocoder.us commercially ... the service is nice.  We have 
a deal currently.  For people looking to host their own DB, the census 
data is publically available.... if you can mingle your own DB, then you 
can do an unlimited amount of queries.

Just my two cents.  The people over at geocoder are very nice though. 
What exactly is your purpose?