Why can't you just make a POI file for the whole US?

[steve dave]

Sorry if this is covered elsewhere but I didn't see anything.

I want to be able to find Home Depots and Lowes plus other stores anywhere in the country. When I look at the threads for these files in these forums I see people asking for certain areas to be added. Can't you just make a file with all the Home Depots in the US?

I tried doing this using the MyPOI program. I do a search for Home Depot and ask it to find all within 9999 miles of my home. I get a bunch of other stuff too but after I delete the Home Insurance Depot and stuff like that I then save the file and put it in my USA and Canada file on my Tomtom One LE. Problem is when I do a search the closest one to my house it can find is in Tennessee and I live in Northwest Ohio. Am I doing something wrong or is it impossible to make a file off all the Home Depots in the US because other people with more knowledge then me about this stuff don't seem to be doing it.

Thanks.

 

[dmunsil]

There are a bunch of issues here. In general, you can make POI files for the whole US, and lots of the POI files here and on other sites do cover the whole US.

For companies that have lots of locations, a POI file of all their locations could get huge. Also, there's no easy way to find all their locations, usually.

If you do a search using MyPOI, it just basically searches using Yahoo or Google or something, and those results are hit-and-miss. If you search on Home Depot's own web site, they have a pretty good list, but you end up needing to write a custom web scraper to iterate through all the states or all the zip codes, find all the listings that are returned from the location search, filter out the duplicates, then feed that list through a geocoding program that maps addresses to GPS coordinates, etc., etc.

Also, often people really only are going to use a listing for their own state or region, so they don't really want a huge POI file for the entire country. There are limits on the number of POIs and the number of categories that a TomTom unit can hold. The custom POIs are stored in a less efficient format than the built-in POIs, so even though the TomTom has maybe 4 or 5 million POIs built-in, if you tried to add another 4 or 5 million it's quite possible it would grind to a halt.

So long story short, you can make a file for the whole country, but it's not always easy.

Don

 

[Pedro2NR]

Don hit the nail on this one.
MyPoi isn't great at making POIs for the whole nation.
People have contact the business and request a POI for their locations.
Others have requested their locations and have manually made the POI file.
If some websites have all their locations on their without having to input your zipcode, then I usually can copy all the addresses and make it into a POI file.