
Overview
This page lays out some of the differences between our service
and Google's geocoder and hopefully helps make the transition to
using our service as easy as possible.
At a high level there are three major differences:

We use open data

Affordable pricing

Technical differences
Before we dive in ...

Built with open data

Pricing

Technical differences in API request and response
Query Parameters |
Both services require an API key, supplied in the
key=
parameter.
You will find your key in your account dashboard. Google requires an address=
parameter for forward geocoding and
lat=
and
lon=
for reverse geocoding.
We instead require q=
for both forward and reverse geocoding.
See the
request format documentation
where you can also learn about the
various optional parameters
we support.
|
Output Formats |
While Google only supports JSON and XML, we support JSON, XML, and GeoJSON. |
Structured Queries |
Google supports structured queries. We do not. This is intentional, our goal is to keep the service as simple as possible for developers to comprehend and get productive with our service. Please follow the steps laid out in our guide to query formatting. |
Annotations |
By default we provide lot of other relevant information about the location of each result, we call these annotations. Google does not. |
Address Components |
Both services return different components of the location
hierarchy, Google does this in a field called
address_components ,
we do it in the
components
portion of the result.
The comprehensiveness and values may differ between the two
services.
Learn more about our
components,
and how we use them to create a well formatted local address
string.
|
Location Type |
Google returns the type of match in a field called
location_type .
We provide a
confidence score
that tells you the size of the result.
Separately we also provide the
_type
key and value in the
components
portion of the result.
|