PHP/MySQL List of university coordinates

Question

I am trying to get the user's coordinates and get a short list of the nearest universities in the area.

So my initial thoughts were to populate my own MySQL with a heck of a lot of universities and coordinates, so I can use a searching algorithm to match the closest handful of universities with the data in my database.

Is that realistic to accomplish? To find a list of all universities, I have looked at: this question, and when I went to the site, it seemed like the files were exported as .uid? I'm not sure how to deal with this. Also, if I have a list of universities, how can I get the coordinates of them? Would geocoder work? If it's possible I would also like a list of high schools, but ignore that for now.

What do you think? Am I missing something? Is there a more efficient way to get a list of the closest universities to a user?

Answer 1

If you have the list of all universities with its address, you can use The Google Geocoding API https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/ to retrieve the coordinates. You can write a script that fill a table of a database with the information.

Edit:

I've found this site: http://www.a2zcolleges.com/address_phone/addressindex.htm, perhaps it may help.