How does "Find Nearest Locations" work?

Question

Nowadays most of the Restaurants and other businesses have a "Find Locations" functionality on their websites which lists nearest locations for a given address/Zip. How is this implemented? Matching the zipcode against the DB is a simple no-brainer way to do but may not always work, for example there may be a branch closer to the given location but could be in a different zip. One approach that comes to my mind is to convert the given zip-code/address into map co-ordinates and list any branches falling into a pre-defined radius. I welcome your thoughts on how this would've been implemented.If possible provide more detailed implementation details like any web-services used etc.,

Answer 1

A lot of geospatial frameworks will help you out with this. In the geospatial world, a zip code is just a "polygon", which is just an area on a map which defines clear boundaries (not a polygon in the math sense). In SQL 2008 spatial, for example, you can create a new polygon based on your original polygon. So you can dynamically create a polygon that is your zip code extended by a certain distance at every point. It takes the funky shape of the zip code into account. With an address, It’s easy, because you just create a polygon, which is a circle around the one point. You can then do queries give you all points within the new polygon that you created in either method.

A lot of these sites are basically just doing this. They give you all points within a 5 mile extended polygon, and then maybe a 10 mile extended polygon, and so on and so forth. They are not actually calculating distance. Most ma stuff on the web is not sophisticated at all.

You can see some basic examples here to get the general idea of what I'm talking about.

Answer 2

There is a standard zipode/location database available. Here is one version in Access format that includes the lat/long of the zipcode as well as other information. You can then use The PostgreSQL GIS extensions to do searches on the locations for example.

(assuming of course that you extract the access db and insert into a more friendly database like PostgreSQL)