From: flo@...
Date: 2008-05-30T19:08:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Address search algorithms

Actually, i had such a problem. You problem is 
the adress normalization. We solved it by using an external resource: 
google maps - they are really good at that.

When someone enters an address, you do a call to google maps to
retrieve the coodinates of an address and save the together with the adress. 

When someone enters a search string, you call google again to retrieve the
coordinates and then you search you database for addresses with coordinates 
that are within a certain radius.

If you know what your doing and you use a good geocoding-lib, thats about 20-30 lines of code for both operations.

Regards,
Florian Gilcher