Partial Address Search / Typeahead

Question

We have an address field we want to provide typeahead for. It sits behind a login, although if we needed to we could get crafty and make that one page public for licensing compliance.

The Google Maps API is getting locked down. We used to use the "reverse geocode" portion of it to perform partial address search / typeahead for addresses - so for example if the user typed:

1600 Penn

I could hit the service and get back several suggestions, like:

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC

There are several other partial address searches out there I've come across but they each have problems.

Google: $10000/yr minimum for just 7500 requests/day - ridiculous

Yahoo: Shutdown this year

Bing: Requires the page to be public / not behind login. This isn't a hard stop for us, but it would be a challenging redesign of how the page works.

Mapquest OpenStreetMap API: Searches for the exact string rather than a leading string - so it returns Penn Station instead of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Mapquest OpenStreetMap data: We could download all of this and implement our own, but the CPU and data requirements would likely be too much to bite off for the time being.

We're fine with paying for usage, we'd just seek a solution closer to Amazon's $0.01/10000 requests than Google's.

Answer 1

UPDATE: My original answer, intact below, was given before SmartyStreets had an address autocomplete offering, which is free with a LiveAddress API subscription.

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It's simple, really. The USPS has approved certain vendors for address verification/standardization services. I work for one such company, SmartyStreets, and in my experience, what you are trying to do is probably easier than you think with a good API that has a REST endpoint. Look into the LiveAddress API.

Submit a street address and at least a city/state, or zip, or both, and you'll get a list of suggested results.

NOTICE, however, that non-CASS providers such as Google Maps do address approximation, not address validation. Google - and others - make a "best guess" which is what Google and them are expert at. If you want actual existing addresses, make sure you find a service that does just that. I'll add that LiveAddress is free now and offers better performance than, for example, the USPS API.