I am about to implement a geo search on a website. I really don’t want to enter any location information into my database as my experience of doing so is always that it is a time drain and no-one is every particularly happy with the results.
I have been investigating Google Fusion tables and the solutions using KML such as here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/overlays.html#KMLLayers
Has anyone tried this along side the google maps search api (to get hold of locations rather than storing myself) and putting the search results latitude/longitude into Google Fusion?
I have also heard SQL 2008 has good functionality in this area too. I am trying to find the most innovative way but it seems there are many solutions and finding the best is not easy!
I have basically taken the approach of using the Google API on an auto complete and then taking the latitude and longitude and comparing to the stored data using Linq.
It is not finished but early indications suggest it will be fast. The one downside is that the Google API returns lots of rather odd results rather than just a town name. We are working to optimise this though. In general the Google Geocode API is very useful indeed.