How to refined geocoding of searches

August 12, 2009 7:59 AM

What is the best way of getting data from a search engine in a form that it can be parsed into addresses? The end goal is to geocode it.

I am interested in geocoding the results of businesses and services that I get as a result of a search. I've experimented with yahoo pipes, but I am unable to get a large number of results, and am not sure if this is the best way to go about it. I imagine people do this quite a bit, so I was wondering what the best strategy was.

I'm quite new to this, so all suggestions welcome.

Once I have addresses, I can bulk-geocode them without a problem, I just need to get to that step.

posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Response by poster: ah! should have been 'How to refine'.....
sorry
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 8:01 AM on August 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

So do you have the addresses and you're trying to parse/geocode them all, or do you have a bunch of text and you're trying to parse it into addresses? Either way, it sounds like regular expressions will be involved in your solution.
posted by jgunsch at 11:38 AM on August 12, 2009

Response by poster: At the moment, I am trying to get the results from a search (e.g. 'pharmacies, boston'), and copying the list of results into a text editor to get the relevant pieces out.

I'm not familiar with regular expressions, so I'm just reading up on that now.
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 11:50 AM on August 12, 2009

Sign up for a Google API key and use the binding of choice for whatever language you're using. Here's an example for Google::Search in perl.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:55 AM on August 12, 2009