14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo’s interest in the web geolocation market is becoming clearer and clearer. While it didn’t manage to buy Foursquare, it did buy an Indonesian startup that provides a very similar service. And now it’s launching Yahoo PlaceFinder, an API / web service aimed at developers building location features into their apps. Yahoo already had a geocoding API, but the new offering adds a lot of new capabilities.
“PlaceFinder supports building-level address recognition in over 75 countries, and points of interest, airports, cities, and other place names (including administrative areas) for these countries and the rest of the world,” Martin Barnes, Yahoo Geo Technologies PlaceFinder, wrote.
“In addition to supporting free-form, single-line, and multi-line address inputs, PlaceFinder also supports queries that include cross streets, WOEID, and IATA airport codes. And for the first time from Yahoo! Geo Technologies, PlaceFinder also supports reverse geocoding (give it a longitude/latitude coordinate and get back the nearest address),” he added.
The new tool is pretty powerful if only for the amount of data it packs. It has mapping info for over 75 countries and it also has an extensive database of places in those countries. This is significant, as several companies, large and small, are racing to have the most complete and accurate places database. Location data alone is not very useful if it can’t be put in context.
Yahoo PlaceFinder replaces the Yahoo Maps Geocoding API, though the latter will still be offered for the remainder of the year. PlaceFinder now has 32 data fields for each location including WOEID (Where on Earth ID), Time Zone, Neighborhood, and so on. A very interesting addition is the possibility to supply a location and receive the nearest address or place, which is why the PlaceFinder name makes sense.
There are plenty of companies battling out in the geolocation space. Google has been plowing forward with Google Places, a repository of places, landmarks and points of interest that it wants to eventually encompass the world. Location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla have been amassing their own collections of places from a variety of sources, including their users. Twitter has also unveiled Places, a new feature that associates an actual place with a geotagged tweet. And, from the looks of it, the war is just getting started.