Returning neighborhood based on address with Google geocoder/API

Question

Is there any way to effectively/accurately pull out a neighborhood within a city based on a passed in address, zip, city, state to the Google Geocoder?

Whenever I try to do it via HTTP (ideal solution) It returns the following info

<kml>
−
<Response>
<name>anthonys cookies san francisco California</name>
−
<Status>
<code>200</code>
<request>geocode</request>
</Status>
−
<Placemark id="p1">
<address>San Francisco, CA, USA</address>
−
<AddressDetails Accuracy="4">
−
<Country>
<CountryNameCode>US</CountryNameCode>
<CountryName>USA</CountryName>
−
<AdministrativeArea>
<AdministrativeAreaName>CA</AdministrativeAreaName>
−
<SubAdministrativeArea>
<SubAdministrativeAreaName>San Francisco</SubAdministrativeAreaName>
−
<Locality>
<LocalityName>San Francisco</LocalityName>
</Locality>
</SubAdministrativeArea>
</AdministrativeArea>
</Country>
</AddressDetails>
−
<ExtendedData>
<LatLonBox north="37.8454521" south="37.7043396" east="-122.2913561" west="-122.5474749"/>
</ExtendedData>
−
<Point>
<coordinates>-122.4194155,37.7749295,0</coordinates>
</Point>
</Placemark>
</Response>
</kml>

If you notice, the "locality name" still says San Francisco?

At this point I am open to making use of the Javascript API/call as opposed to the HTTP call, it just seemed like overkill (and more of a headache) for what I am trying to do.

Ideally, I need this to work in San Francisco for now, but it would be nice if I could get it to work for all of the major U.S. Cities.

Brannon

What locality/neighbourhood name would you be expecting instead of San Francisco in this case? I have seen Google Maps deal with districts in the past. – Christogram

I was hoping for something like "The Mission" OR "Mission" in this case. I too know that Google should be more than capable of handling a query like this as the data is definitely at your disposal, but as is apparent here, it's returning the whole city of San Francisco as a locality name? – Brannon

Answer 1

As far as I know, you can't get Neighborhood data through the google maps API. You can try another web service like Urban Mapping's Neighborhood API: http://developer.urbanmapping.com/demo/ or Maponics (http://www.maponics.com/Neighborhood_Boundaries/neighborhood_boundaries.html). Urban Mapping's API contains methods for getting neighborhood by lat long and also various address elements.

Disordered

This is not true. I have used Google Maps to get neighborhood names before. – Fulbright

Answer 2

function getGeoInfo($street,$city,$state) {
    $url = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address={$street}+{$city},+{$state}&sensor=false";
    $json_returned = file_get_contents($url);
    $data = json_decode($json_returned);
    return ($data);
}

Just as an example, of course you will have to urlEncode your variables and I would suggest using CuRL instead of the *file_get_contents* function.

If you var_dump the return you will see the neighborhood data and the structure to access it.

Necessaries

Answer 3

An update - neighborhood data, when it is available, is now provided through Google's Geocoder via the new V3 API. Neighborhood is just another data type in the address_components array. More info is at code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/

Hungry

Answer 4

Use the free service from http://www.maxmind.com/app/ip-location

You're never going to get it 100% accurate, but it should give you a head start.

There's also geotargeting in HTML5, but not all browsers support it yet and I'm unsure how to extract the user's geo location.

Hackery

Great service, and advice, but it seems like this service speaks more to geolocating visitors to your site based on their IP. I am specifically looking to pull neighborhood data from some API (Google in this case), based on an address passed to the API from a form. i.e. in the above example the neighborhood should show as "The mission district" or "Mission". – Brannon

Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant. I don't think Google Maps supports areas like what you're after. – Hackery