What is a geocoder?

A geocoder turns geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) into a geographic reference - such as an address, a place name, or locality - or vice versa. The good folks at Wikipedia explain this far better than we can.

Do you do forward geocoding?

Yes, with our API you can do "forward geocoding" which is the process of turning an address or place name into coordinates.

What about reverse geocoding?

Yes, we can gladly also do "reverse geocoding" which means turning coordinates into a human understandable place name or address. Just pass the coordinates as a latitude and a longitude, separated by either a comma or a (URL encoded) space and the API will automagically work out that you want to reverse geocode. Here's an example:

GET api/GeoCoding/Address?appKey={appKey}&lat=40.7487727&lng=-73.9849336

Do you make maps?

No. We focus on doing one thing well - a geocoding API. If you need custom maps, there are many great services out there.

Do you provide routing?

No. As above, we focus on doing one thing well - a geocoding API.

What countries can you geocode for?

All of them; there's worldwide, global coverage. But it will vary from country to country, and even within countries. Coverage will depend on the data sources we use.

What's behind the geocoder API?

Other geocoders and lots and lots of open data.
There's Nominatim, Data Science Toolkit and the Two Fishes geocoders.
All of this is built on open geospatial data including OpenStreetMap, Yahoo! GeoPlanet, Natural Earth Data, Thematic Mapping, Ordnance Survey OpenSpace, Statistics New Zealand, Zillow, MaxMind, GeoNames, the US Census Bureau and Flickr's shapefiles plus a whole lot more besides. Here's the full list of datasources.

So why shouldn't I just use those opensource geocoders directly?

A few reasons.
First up, hosting your own software and keeping it up to date (and keeping the underlying data up to date) can be a non-trivial technical challenge. It will cost you time and effort. If that type of opsy problem is your thing, go for it. Or you can just let us handle it, and instead get on with geocoding.
There are proprietary geocoding services, and technically some are really very impressive. But typically they cost a lot and/or severly limit what you can do with the results.
There are other hosted open geocoding services, most obviously OpenStreetMap's own Nominatim service. However that is designed to be used as a tool by mappers, not as an enterprise level geocoding service, and indeed the usage policy explicitly says it "has a very limited capacity" and users may be blocked if querying too frequently.
Also, we do a lot to enhance the results we send you, adding confidence scoring, annotations, well formatted nice-names.

Will you add more geocoders in the future?

Yes, please get in touch if you have a specific suggestion.