I've been working on a side project that needs to geocode a large amount of addresses, so as a tangent I built this geocoding API over the past month. The state of open source geocoding tools is pretty amazing, especially if you only need to geocode addresses in the US.

I explored Nominatim, which uses Open Street Map data, and PostGIS before settling on PostGIS. Nominatim has the ability to geocode international addresses, which is a huge plus, but it runs as a standalone web service and its address parser seemed to have trouble with many addresses that PostGIS handled well. PostGIS can be setup with the US census Tiger/Line data to cover the entire country and runs directly in the database which gives quite a performance boost.

Nice work! I really like the minimal homepage.

One small suggestion, when someone clicks the 'Try It' button and it scrolls to the address input have it focus the input for the user.

I've actually been needing the exact opposite of this tool lately. I have a bunch of lat lon pairs that I need turned into addresses. Any plans to add reverse geocoding any time soon?

Tell me the difference between this service and Google Geocoding, OpenCage, or OpenStreetMap?