Blog: Location

As I fired off requests to Google's geocoder API to plot several thousand points on a map for a recent project, a quick calculation showed that only about a third of the data returned valid latitude and longitude information. The data set I was dealing with was international - mapping members from nearly every country - so I knew I would have some issues, but only a third successful?

When you go to the internet are you looking for information from sources around the world or local information?

The two largest search engines, Google and Yahoo, are seeing the high demand for local content and have started to make it easier to search locally. A Kelsey Group study said that 25 per cent of all commercial on-line searches are now local in nature.... obviously knowing that a user is searching for something in a certain geographical area could help out a lot with better targeted advertising.

Two new articles from the 5th and 4th of October, respectively.