Beginning Google Maps Applications

Yesterday Google announced that they were releasing a geocoding solution during their Geo Developer Day! We’re as excited as you are and we’re going to scramble to include as much information as possible about it in the book before it goes to print in a month and a half. For everything we miss or that isn’t finalized, there will always be this blog.

To start here are a few of the key details we’re excited about:

• It covers multiple countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and of course the United States!
• It provides street level detail for these countries.
• They have a generous 50,000 lookups per day limit (compared to Yahoo’s 5,000).
• They have a Javascript based version, though we’re still sorting out what that will be useful for.
• You can get information in KML or JSON formats as well as XML.

This really is the first attempt at a free international geocoding solution that we’ve come across. Sure others like geonames.org provide access to multiple countries, but it is not nearly as integrated as Google’s solution appears to be.

We’ll have more information in the book and in coming blog posts, but for now check out the official news group and the official announcement.