Creating Custom POI Lists - geocoding issues

[Michael Quinlan]

I've made a couple of custom POI lists recently, and have come across some issues that I'm hoping someone can shed some light on. So far I've worked with listings for Costco, Home Depot and Lowe's. What I'm finding is that the batch geocoding sites I've been using (www.BatchGeoCode.com and www.gpsVisualizer.com, both of which appear to use the Yahoo! API) return inconsistent results from one pass to the next, for the same addresses. Almost every time, some addresses fail to be geocoded - returning zeros for coordinates, and other times I may get two (or more) distant addresses with identical coordinates. Running the failed addresses through again most often produces different results.

Am I missing something? Once I found these batch geocoding web sites, I thought the hard part would be scouring the store locators for the data, but that turned out to be the easy part so far. Is this hit-or-miss reliability normal?

 

[Michael Quinlan]

I found an issue with the data I was submitting to GPS Visualizer that was causing a problem there. However, I continue to get strange results from www.BatchGeoCode.com. For instance, after geocoding about 1500 addresses I had 6 address that had the exact same coordinates as other addresses. I removed the duplicates and the matching (apparently correctly geocoded) addresses and re-geocoded them only to find that some of them now duplicated OTHER addresses that had not ben re-submitted.

On the bright side though, GPS Visualizer seems to work very well with tab-delimited data - only 15/2175 addresses that failed to geocode (returning 0,0 as coordinates), which when re-submitted worked fine.