Question

I’m working on a shipping system for my company where user’s enter (along with a bunch of other information) the destination that something needs to get shipped to. The system that we are migrating from just used this information as static text, so people would enter shorthand addresses such as “Alsip 60801”.

My original thought was that that sort of shorthand text would work perfectly with Google Maps API, because I can type shorthand things into maps.google.com, and it generally works.

So, I wrote up some code to run geocoding on their shorthand inputs. To my unfortunate surprise, the results returned from the geocode search were greatly different from those that are returned from maps.google.com.

For example, when I search for “Alsip 60801” on maps.google.com, I get Alsip, IL 60801. That’s correct. But when I search using the Google Maps API, I get some Alsip up in Canada.

Is there another search function that I should be using for the Google Maps API? Or some sort of flag that I am missing?

For reference, this is the short version of my code:

 var geocode = new google.maps.Geocoder();

 geocode.geocode( {'address': 'Alsip 60801' }, function(results, status) {
      console.log(results[0].geometry.location);
      //Outputs the LatLng of a Canada address
 });  

Edit 1: I forgot to mention, I did try setting the region on the geocode request. I set it to us, and got the same results.

Update – Answered: I marked @Jitimaro’s answer as correct, because tacking the country code onto the end of the results does seem to work. I’m not sure if that will work with every sort of input (it’s hard to predict shorthand address formats), but it seems to work fine for now.

However, I actually am handling this a different way. Instead of just tacking a country code onto the end of the address, I’m actually providing a LatLngBounds parameter on the end of my geocode request. That gives all addresses within my bounds preferential treatment as it is searching.

Answer 1

When you search with the website you should get a preview like this: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Alsip+60801. When you search a reverse geocode you must parse the result to match your country http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/geo?q=Alsip+60801. You can check the different url with a network sniffer. Or you can add the country to your url http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/geo?q=Alsip+60801+USA.