[HN Gopher] PlacesAPI
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       PlacesAPI
        
       Author : richrawlz
       Score  : 26 points
       Date   : 2022-01-23 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.placesapi.co.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.placesapi.co.uk)
        
       | somishere wrote:
       | Interesting. I literally just pushed live a small project for
       | global city searches. Idea was for a drop-in polyfill for Algolia
       | Places (`type: city`) once their service sunsets in May, a
       | service which my org uses a lot. In the polyfil searches run in
       | memory in the browser, served from a CDN.
       | 
       | https://theprojectsomething.github.io/re.places
        
       | samwillis wrote:
       | This is interesting but only seems to work to town/city level, is
       | there any plans to go to street/full address level?
       | 
       | I have used loqate.com for autocomplete on store checkouts, but
       | it not cheap. Always have my eye out for alternatives.
       | 
       | I know it's a difficult one to provide as, unlike in the US with
       | zip codes being effectively public domain, in the UK the Post
       | Code database is "owned" by Royal Mail. You have to pay them to
       | access it or resell access to it, which is why Loqat is from 6p
       | per lookup (this is 0.35p).
       | 
       | There are a few "open source" database projects to recreate the
       | Post Code geolocation lost but it's not vary accurate or complete
       | from previous experience.
       | 
       | Hopefully one day Royal Mail will be nationalised again and
       | someone there will decide, quite rightly, that it would be of
       | national interest to make the Post Code database freely
       | available.
        
         | drcongo wrote:
         | Just in case it's not already on your radar, I've used
         | http://postcodes.io before and found it very good.
        
           | samwillis wrote:
           | Sadly that doesn't include street addresses. The same people
           | that created that also have ideal-postcodes.co.uk, similar to
           | Loqat but a bit cheaper at ~3.5p a lookup. Will have a good
           | play and see how accurate the postcodes seem as I'm assuming
           | it's using their postcodes.io db.
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-23 23:00 UTC)