Calculate Distances Between Addresses Without Google Maps

Question

I bascially want to create a search in our Sales Orders database to find items that where shipped within a range of a particular address.

I can't use Google's API because: It will be a report and there is no way to display a Map at runtime, which violates the terms of service. Google limits you to 1,600 requests a day, so comparing and arbitrary address to all our sales orders would violate that before 1 search completed. I imagine running the directions API to compare the address to each order in our database would take forever.

Answer 1

A lot of this will depend on the precision and exactly what you want to do.

For example, if you want Line of Sight calculations, you can use a service like this one http://geocoder.us/ to get the Latitude and Longitude of each address, from this you can do a simple calculation to get the "as the crow flies" distance between this point and another.

if you want true driving direction distance, that will be much more complicated.

Answer 2

You could use the Yahoo! geocoding API and cache the lat/lons to the database, and then use the lat/lons and standard mapping library calls to determine the distance to your point of interest.

Answer 3

Have you looked at other geocoding APIs, like Yahoo or Bing?

There's also this one, which says it's free and offers a few .NET code samples.