documentation/get-started.md

Get started with Mapzen Search

Mapzen Search is a modern geocoding and place search service based on Pelias, an experimental, open geocoder from Mapzen and powered by open data. It's used to transform the way people talk about places - with names and addresses - into geographic coordinates, and to translate geographic coordinates into recognizable names of places.

Mapzen Search can be used to:

• quickly localize your users so they can discover locally relevant content.
• provide a super-fast typeahead solution which feels intuitive for non technical users.
• improve your database by adding geographic columns, such as home_city and country to your users table.
• store numeric co-ordinate data instead of strings, for later use in reporting, analytics and machine learning.
• improve existing geographic data by augmenting it with information about the enveloping country, city or state.

Mapzen Search offers:

• Forward Geocoding for Addresses + Venues: Used to find a particular place based on the rules of an address, or the name of a landmark or business
• Forward Coarse Geocoding for Neighbourhoods, Localities, regions, and countries: Used to find and localize a service to a particular area or region. Searches only for these places, but with worldwide coverage
• Restricting searches to a known area or radius
• Focusing a search: Searches all known places, but prioritizes places closer to the user (when the user's current location or approximate location is known)
• Autocomplete searches for forward geocoding: Allows a developer to build interfaces where an end-user can search for places and match against Mapzen Search's data in real-time
• Limiting results to a particular country: Allows the scoping of results to a particular country
• Reverse geocoding addresses + venues: Tries to find the name/address of the closest matching place to a geographic coordinate pair (a longitude and latitude). This can be used to take abstract location data (e.g. an end-user's device location) and find the closest address (often used in a weather or deliver app on someone's phone)
• Coarse reverse geocoding: Converts a geographic coordinate pair into the regional hiearchy for that particular place (e.g neighbourhood > locality (city/town) > Local Administrative Area (County, Prefecture) > Region (state/province) > country). This can be used to determine the general region of geographic data and can be quite useful in filtering for places in non-geographic databases that represent things that happen in places