U.S. Address Geocoder

U.S. Address Geocoder

The U.S. Address Geocoder Apify Actor is a powerful tool that converts U.S. addresses to latitude and longitude coordinates in bulk. Geocoding is the process of assigning geographic coordinates to an address, allowing you to pinpoint locations on a map and unlock a wide range of location-based insights.

Drastically cheaper than the Google Maps API

Google Maps offers a Geocoding API, but it's prohibitively expensive. Google charges $5 per 1,000 geocoded addresses. If you have tens or hundreds of thousands of addresses to geocode, you'll be paying a small fortune to Google.

Using the U.S. Address Geocoder with the default settings, geocoding 1,000 addresses will cost about $0.07. The Google Maps Geocoding API is more expensive by a factor of 70!

The U.S. Address Geocoder scrapes data from the U.S. Census Bureau to match addresses to geographical coordinates, all at a fraction of the cost of Google Maps Geocoding API.

What will the results look like

The U.S. Address Geocoder takes a list of U.S. addresses as input, such as:

• 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500
• 350 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10118

The output for an address will look like this:

1{
2        "address": "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500",
3        "matchedAddress": "1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVE NW, WASHINGTON, DC, 20500",
4        "lat": 38.89869091865549,
5        "lng": -77.03654395730787
6    }

In some cases, the matchedAddress will be a slight variation of the input address. For example, Drive could be changed to DR. When there is no match for the supplied address, matchedAddress, lat, and lng will all be null.

Limitations

The output from this actor is only as good as the underlying data, which comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, and the quality of the input addresses. Addresses that are misspelled, formatted incorrectly, or nonexistent may not return valid or accurate geocoded coordinates. The results may also not line up exactly with output from other services like the Google Maps Geocoding API.