Screenshot As announced yesterday Google Maps now includes an API to provide geocoding.

When you want to see a place on the map, simply write the address in the box and hit enter. When Google finds something the explorer opens and gives you an overview of the searched place.

You can try countries (’Italy’, ‘Germany’, ‘Vatican’, ‘Andorra’, ‘Poland’) or cities (’Köln’, ‘New York’) and even addresses (’Bonnerstr Köln’). Though it seems service is still changing and sometimes gives results and sometimes not using same search string. I will check it out next week again, when it is more stable and add a better zoom detector and a place indicator.

Street-level geocoding is available for the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan. More countries will be added as Google Maps launches in new countries.

The geocoder returns one place only, while geonames.org finds for example 350 toponyms called ‘Paris’. In this case I’m happy with the choosen place, don’t blame me when you find your place of birth on a different continent, choose the toponym search instead and scroll through the list, which is quite comfortable when you’re already on the map.

Will get updated next week……