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Wanting to be more Google-centric, I’ve reworked the mapping API on Seattle Condos to use Google Maps instead of Yahoo’s mapping API.
Why would I do this? It’s up to debate, but I believe that the more data Google has available to it, the better chance you have to appear in their search listings. Using Google’s API will provide Google with more information than by using Yahoo’s API.
Previously, our geocoding was accomplished with Yahoo’s simple, intuitive API. Supplying an address and zipcode was enough to have Yahoo geocode an address and display it on their map. Switching to Google’s API was not difficult, but required a few small steps.
Google does not allow you to map points using addresses, instead you must provide a latitude and longitude. To accomplish this, I choose to use geokit for rails to geocode our existing addresses. I wrote a script to cycle through our database and geocode each record, then save the new coordinates for future use. After the coordinates were obtained, we could easily map the points using Google’s API,
Here’s is a sample of the code I used with geokit:
@location = YahooGeocoder.geocode("#{@condo.address}, #{@condo.zipcode}")
