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ManAboutCouch's comments

ManAboutCouch | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: what features do you want in a geocoder?

One thing that I make use of but don't see too many services providing is some kind of 'match level' - where the geocoder returns a code indicating how confident it is about the quality of it's result. A result of 1 might mean a building level match, while 100 might be street level etc.

IIRC Google's geocoder does something like this, but it's pretty inaccurate, overstating it's match level consistently.

As others have said, geocoding is very hard to do well, but I commend the efforts being made with Nominatim and komoot/photon.

ManAboutCouch | 12 years ago | on: It is criminal that Apple gets away with not allowing alternative defaults

The problem with the iframe approach is that Google's geocoding service TOS explicitly states that the output of the geocode operation can only be displayed on a Google map.

Google's geocoding service is underpinned by a lot of third party datasets which would have to be (very expensively) relicensed if Google started passing the results out to maps under the control of other organisations.

ManAboutCouch | 13 years ago | on: Vector Tiles for MapBox Streets

I believe that other transport modes (public transport, on foot) are in the pipeline, but the amount of additional compute power they need is significant

Also Public Transport route and connectivity information is frequently a bit patchy in OSM, but this is steadily improving.

ManAboutCouch | 14 years ago | on: Google Maps goof results in headache for homeowner

I'll add the obligatory tip of the hat to www.openstreetmap.org - it's community basis and the ease of use of it's editing tools make this kind of issue very easy for users to fix.

And as a bonus, any edits you make to the data aren't owned and copyrighted by a large corporate, but are made available to everyone via a Creative Commons Licence (soon to be ODbL)

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