The theme you touch on is covered at length in the book 'Computer Power and Human Reason'.
For most of high school years, our house was listed as "311 Behind the School" or some other variation. There were no actual street names (although I am told the electric company and only the electric company had a map with street names). When 911 service hit the area, we got actual addresses, but they really weren't useful for shipping things. The local UPS guy knew where everyone was and where they worked so he could do his deliveries. His replacement required some training time.
The Post Office didn't do a route on the reservation (come pick it up - all PO Boxes), and FedEx was the most pain in the rear, evil group ever (drive 2 hours to pick up you package because we stop delivering in late Dec). You can work up quite the mad driving two hours to pick up network cable in a ND winter.
Around 1996, I actually had to tell a vendor we couldn't do business with them anymore because they had to ship FedEx. FedEx did get better, but don't mix up FedEx and FedEx Ground else there will be a lecture.
// never mind the "Easter Egg housing" and how they got their name - cheap*$$ government and their "bright" paints
I tried that for a project, using the Google geocode API. Worked OK, though not flawless.
Users entered their address into a textarea. This got passed off to Google, and the app then looked at Google's response. In case of ambiguity the user would be prompted to clarify the address and try again.
The intent was to reduce crap in the application database, but at the same time we had to allow users to override whatever Google thought and provide a literal address.