Scalable international geocoding solutions

Question

We want out website to support international geocoding. We are wary of using APIs that throttle and/or cap requests, which could leave us with our pants down as the service gains volume. How do modern websites such as Facebook implement geocoding? Are there tools to implement accurate in-house scalable geocoding solutions for the entire world?

Answer 1

I don't know about APIs for international geoconding. However, maybe Cassandra http://cassandra.apache.org/ can add something of value for you. Although it is a storage-centric solution, it surely can scale.

Twitter is using it for storing geolocation and places of interest data http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/cassandra-at-twitter-today.html as well as https://simplegeo.com/

Answer 2

I know that this is an older question. You could always use a service, then cache the relevant result in a local database... simply look local first before falling back to the service. After a while, most of your requests will be hits against your local database, with very few fallbacks.

For a U.S. based project, we started with a seeded U.S. zipcode database, and using Bing as a fallback, never once hit the 5,000/day (iirc) limit. YMMV with this solution, but it isn't an unreasonable one.