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Comment by jstreebin | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by fuzzier? We're doing it carrier-based, so that the corresponding postage works. What are you needing this for?

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    "388 Townsend San Fran"

Would yield the same as above. Addresses are inherently dirty data and there aren't any decent/affordable/legal services that offer this. You can use Google Maps Geocoder or Yahoo Placefinder but both have fairly strict quotas and are only intended (legally speaking) for use with their mapping products. USPS/FedEx/UPS are also restricted unless you're shipping with them.

Edit - Yahoo is actually letting people pay very respectable rates for their PlaceFinder service now. This is great: http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/geo/

There's SmartyStreets. You tried them?

Yeah, SmartyStreets sucks for a few reasons:

1) They are abusing the USPS api and charging access for it.

2) The USPS resolver sucks anyhow. "388 Townsend San Fran" yields an error. Google & Yahoo both correctly match it.

3) Their pricing is pretty expensive, imo.

How did you arrive at #1? We used USPS's api for a year before switching to SmartyStreets, and there's no way their api is powered by USPS's buggy api.

Ah, got it. How are they abusing it? You can buy that data as well from USPS.

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