Emad Fanous

Would you like to be able to geocode Virtual Earth and/or Google Maps without the hassle? Or how about any application requiring the use of javascript?

Well, you can use this API for it:

It is a javascript API and you can call it like so:

The base URL is:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/

To enter a freeform location (you have one entry box that accepts any address format such as street address, zipcode, city/state, etc):
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?loc=1600+Amphitheatre+Parkway,+Mountai n+View+CA++94043
In other words, just use the “loc” parameter. Currently, only the US is supported for freeforms….I have to decode all potential formats for non-US addresses.

If you would like more accuracy (or international support), break the text entry fields up into multiple fields. Mix and match and use whichever you’d like from the following parameters:
address (street address)
city
state
zip
some examples:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?city=burbank&state=ca
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?zip=90069
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?street=48+Leicester+Square&city=London &country=UK
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?city=sydney&country=au

The default URLs above are for the Google Maps API. To use the Virtual Earth API, construct the URL the same as you would above and add the following parameter “&ve=1″ … for example,
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?city=burbank&state=ca&ve=1
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?loc=1600+Amphitheatre+Parkway,+Mountai n+View+CA++94043&ve=1

Alternatively, if you choose to use neither Google Maps nor Virtual Earth (or to have better control to do what you want), you can set a callback parameter with ‘cb=<MethodName>’ like so:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?city=hollywood&state=ca&cb=MyJavascrip tMethod

Some intillegence is there to try to guess the appropriate one…however, if you prefer to override it with your own, you can add the parameter “level=”
For example:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?city=burbank&state=ca yields Google Maps zoom level 4
but you can force it to zoom level 1 by using this url:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?city=burbank&state=ca&level=1

Default behavior is for an alert to happen onerror (currently there are only 2 errors: ‘location not found’ and ‘Please provide a location’). To override this behavior, you can specify a callback for errors by adding a parameter ‘cbe=<function_name>’
For example, the first link below will provide an alert error but the second one will use the specified callback:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?cbe=MyError

If you are not very familiar with javascript and how to leverage this, you can take a look at some of the source of some of the sites using them:
Virtual Earth example
Google Maps Example

Basically, you’ll either use a “script src=<URL>” or

var s = document.createElement( “script” );
s.src=<URL>;
s.type = “text/javascript”;
document.getElementsByTagName( “head” )[0].appendChild(s);

Recommendations? Errors? Feature requests? Post them here and I’ll try and fix/add.

UPDATE: You can now lookup information and geocode by IP Address.
To lookup by the requesting IP address, just add “by_ip=1″ like so:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?by_ip=1

To get city/state info, use a callback:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?by_ip=1&cb=IpLookup

To lookup an IP address by passing it in, rather than using the requestor’s ip:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?by_ip=1&cb=IpLookup&IP=66.249.66.98

Keep in mind, when using IP addresses, that this info isn’t always very good and, in fact, many IP addresses will not have any data. I have built it in to try looking up by IP address when the by_ip=1 parameter is used but to fall back on the other lookup info (i.e. loc or city infor passed in) if the IP address lookup fails.

To try it out, check out the virtual earth or google earth geourl sites and click on the “Guess by my IP Address” link.

UPDATE: API now supports &phone= as well as &format=.
The phone parameter tries doing a reverse lookup to find an address then geocodes that address for you.
The format parameter accepts “XML” or “json” to output in those corresponding formats. Here is an example utilizing both of these features:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?phone=8188463111&format=json
The above is a lookup of the Burbank Chamber of Commerce phone number.

So what am I asking in return for use of this tool?
Well, I’m asking (but not requiring) a reciprocal link to either the localsearchmaps.com homepage or to this blog’s homepage.

Any usage limitations?
Well, if you overburden this server, I might throttle you or even shut you down if you abuse it (never happened yet!). If you think you are blocked, feel free to email me and I will unblock you as long as we clear up any issues.

UPDATE: I have added a new feature as of 2004/02/24. You can now do a reverse lookup of lat/long to address. It currently is much more limited in area and in accuracy than other components of this framework and its performance/response time is not that great yet so use with caution and I will improve over time (feedback always welcome).
To use it, just specify a latitude and longitude in your request like so:
http://geo.localsearchmaps.com/?format=json&lat=34.209539&long=-118.32 5116

Like this service? Help make sure it keeps a good level of service (or even improves it) by donating:

… or how about just a link back to me or localsearchmaps.com?

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Perlmonks has started blocking all robots. The message says:

# sorry, but misbehaved robots have ruined it for all of you.

I don’t get it…why try blocking robots in robots.txt? Misbehaving ones will ignore it and you’ll just exclude it from the beneficial one. Optionally, you can exclude all except for the few major search engines.

You see, here is my problem. I can’t stand the Perlmonks search engine. It is very slow and very irritating. It’s quality of results is also sometimes questionable. The way I resolve this is that I go to Google and type in
“_query term_ site:perlmonks.com” … only one problem…I can’t do that anymore!

As for the SEOs that read this, I would imagine most traffic to perlmonks comes from people going there directly…They have this community bulletin board where people ask for perl programming help and people offer up their help.

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About a month and a half to two months ago, I transitioned my site to a dedicated host.

I thought I had put in all my crons to backup my mysql databases.

Well, I went ahead and did a knucklehead SQL commit that changed a column I didn’t mean to! I was using the commandline mysql client and was executing a statement but had forgotten to escape a quote in the SQL command so it assumed the where restriction was part of the SQL and, it changed all the rows of the table to have the same exact text for that column.

First thing I said was “no big deal…I’ll just grab last night’s mysqldump since I hadn’t added much data since then…that’s when I found out my backups weren’t there…I looked up my old mysql files on the old server I had transitioned off of but there was a significant amount of data missing.

Thankfully, I was able to extract all the SQL from the mysqlbinlogs. The only problem was that the SQL statements had some updates and some inserts…and the inserts did not reference any sort of primary key within the table (they were auto_incremented).

I ended up writing a perl script that parsed the SQL statements, used other columns that, when combined, should be unique, and used those to regenerate and execute SQL against the table to update (rather than reinsert) the data.

I could have also used the older mysql files off of the old server and just rerun all the SQL from the binlogs but I didn’t want to risk losing an inserts I may have had during transitions or when I was moving around mysql files when I was optimizing my database when I first moved the files over.

Anyway, everything was 100% recovered, thank goodness!

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Google has finally released Google Checkout, formerly referred to as GBuy.

Most people are comparing it to Ebay’s Paypal but it is also sounding familiar to Yahoo Shopping in that customers have a way to provide product information (Froogle and the new Google Store) and consumers have a secure way to purchase these products with an account that stores and keeps track of your purchases and credit card information. This 1) makes it far too easy/convenient for you to make purchases (and will encourage users to purchase more), 2) allows Google to make some money off of the transaction, and 3) allows Google to do more things, including with local since obtaining credit card information means a billing & shipping address and would be one of the best ways to validate someone’s location.

Additionally, for those that use Adwords, they can use Google Checkout and will get a little icon next to them to signify they accept this form of payment. For the merchant, it may mean a higher clickthrough rate…even if the consumer does not use Google Checkout, just having that image their may draw the users’ eyes to their ad. Additionally, merchants will like the lower fees with Google Checkout (over paypal). Consumers may also not be quite as concerned with unfamiliar merchants and providing them with credit card information since the only person accessing this info would be Google…this may mean better conversion for those lesser-known merchants. For the consumers, it provides a quick and easy way to shop. For Google, it provides them with a potentially large revenue source as well additional data for them to organize (including conversion rates and user purchasing habits).

Merchants interested in this can find out more here, including amounts of transactions that are free per adwords spend.

Consumers can find out more about Google’s perspective on their blog.

Developers interested in this should checkout their API.

More info here and here.

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Yahoo Local is now supporting microformats. Basically, a way to make markup human-readable/understandable…but the point people are missing is that they are structuring unstructured data and make it more machine readable as well.

Yahoo points to a number of uses but fails to tell us how or i they will use this data. Surely getting additional local and event data in a structured format they can tie into their existing listings would be useful, add value to the consumer, develop more of a community as consumer contribute, and builds this user-generated content cheaply.

These microformats can be used to bolster reviews and ratings, local events tied to venues, and can provide up to date and accurate business contact information (one of the big problems many local search sites have).

more info here.

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Well, it’s been a while. I’ve been pretty busy with various things lately so I have decided to roll up all my updates and summarize them in one post:

• Congrats to Brian Pike for making CTO of Ticketmaster
• Google is providing Sketchup for free (with a paid pro version). It will allow you to create 3D models to integrate with Google Earth. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with this. Here are some ideas
• Ask’s presentation on MySQL is available for download. It includes lots of the stuff we learned over the years but I told him I don’t like binary data like images in the DB (store the paths to them instead)
• Renkoo is in a closed beta. It, like Skobee, is another Evite clone that plans on doing it better. (more on skobee)
• Yahoo launched what appears to be a fixed placement ad product. source…note that this is a posting by Matt Booth. FYI, Citysearch utilized that business model before Matt pushed for the CPC route for CS (a good idea he should get credit for).
• TrueLocal is offering a local traffic estimator tool to advertisers. I’ll try to get around to trying it out and seeing if it provides any real value and post results here. a user can type in shoes in 60612 and the local traffic estimator determines the three most popular categories for this search and the five nearest zip codes to 60612. This allows businesses to accurately asses which categories and zip for which they should bid.…Might be useful to use this tool for all your local marketing campaigns (assuming they get enough traffic for your area where you get a good, representative sample size).
• Microsoft is gearing up for an attack against its search engine rivals….but regular readers here already know that
• I just came across the first mainstream news source article on the v7ndotcom elursrebmem SEO contest. I first came across this one when my blog started getting continually referer and comment spammed with “v7ndotcom elursrebmem.” I didn’t understand why they were trying to optimize those words by spamming me but googling it turned up the reason (hard to find the reason now since everyone is optimizing for those words in the contest):
  

  Searching on “v7ndotcom elursrebmem” on Google yesterday yielded more than 6 million matching pages. My favorite is the site ranked No. 2, which purports to be the official site for “The Grand V7ndotcom Elursrebmem Hotel,” a nonexistent hotel in London, complete with photos and a virtual tour.

• I wonder if the CIA is reading this blog
• We’re selling…We’re not selling. We cater to students, we cater to business people…either way, possibly good for local advertising. Perhaps this is a way to increase their potential audience to get more subscriptions and to capture an audience that isn’t quite so fickle so they don’t become the next Friendster but, instead, tap into revenue from businesses and business networking that hangs around (and may even increase when times get rough as they may be searching for business leads).

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TechCrunch has an entry comparing mainstream maps sites from a consumer’s perspective. They argue Yahoo Maps is the best.

Schuyler put together a post evaluating the available APIs.

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Check out RealEstateabc.com’s home values beta tool. It’s like Zillow but slightly different:

• uses Google Maps. They also put their data into a javascript array right on the page…easy for scrapers to get to (any interested developers out there?)
• refreshes new pages rather than dynamically updating as Zillow does
• Allows a much better interface for you to adjust home values using slider bars for things like market conditions, interior/exterior quality, view, lot size, privacy/noise, etc.
• an interface to include/exclude surrounding properties in the calculation of the property in question (click on a shaded icon and see a checkbox in the bubble asking if you should include it) or add it from the grid below the map
• The default house value estimator of both was off but the Zillow one was closer. My house’s “Zestimate” used to be further off than RealEstateabc’s estimate when Zillow first launched (probably the biggest complaint I heard about them) but I can see a marked improvement

Overall, the Zillow interface is pretty and has some better functional qualities but the RealEstateabc has some nice features/additions that were missing in the Zillow product.

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Just got a reminder from O’Reilly that Where 2.0 2006 is happening on June 13-14 at the Fairmont Hotel San Jose. Registration is open and, if you register by May 1, you save $400.

The tagline is for the conference is: “The Future of Mapping and Local Search”

Everything Happens Somewhere. The Where 2.0 Conference brings together the people, projects, and issues leading the charge into the location based technological frontier. Join us to debate and discuss what’s viable now, and what’s lurking just below the radar. There’s no better place to meet the people behind the mash-ups and platforms, and the folks looking ahead to the future of geospace.

Who and what will be featured at Where 2.0? Amazing location systems, untapped geodata, unsung projects and hardware, people who are poised to make real money–and why. High profile keynote conversations with big players, “high order bitsâ€? demoing cool startups and neat applications. We’re angling for shorter talks with longer breaks so you’ll have more time for one-on-one interactions.

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Here’s a new tool for those who are having problems using the geocoding tool or would just like a simple way to set up a geospatial search:

GepSpatialWebService.com provides you an interface to create multiple container buckets that can hold different datasets. You can then query the interface to pull out the data for integration into various tools (i.e. maps mashups).

More info here.

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