Blog

Browse Geocoding Tutorials, Guides & Updates

Geocoding Software for Insurance: Risk Assessment, Claims & Fraud Detection

Geocoding Software for Insurance: Risk Assessment, Claims & Fraud Detection
An insurance underwriter in Florida reviews 200 new homeowner applications every week. Each one includes an address. The underwriter needs to know: Is this home in a flood zone? How far is it from the nearest fire station? Is the neighborhood prone to vehicle theft? Every answer depends on one thing — converting that address into geographic coordinates. Without geocoding, this analysis is manual....

How to Convert Address to Lat Long in Excel (5 Methods Compared)

How to Convert Address to Lat Long in Excel (5 Methods Compared)
You have a spreadsheet full of addresses and you need latitude and longitude for each one. Maybe it is 50 customer locations, 500 store addresses, or 5,000 delivery stops. Excel does not have a built-in geocoding function, so you need an external method. This guide compares every practical way to convert addresses to lat/long coordinates in Excel — from free formulas to bulk tools that handle 50,0...

How to Reverse Geocode Coordinates to Addresses in Bulk

How to Reverse Geocode Coordinates to Addresses in Bulk
A logistics company in São Paulo collected 50,000 GPS pings every day from its delivery fleet. Latitude, longitude, timestamp, vehicle ID. Clean data, precise to 3 meters. But the operations team could not use any of it — because nobody on the team reads coordinates. They needed addresses. "Where did truck 47 stop for 12 minutes?" is a useful question. "What happened at -23.5614, -46.6558?" is not...

Reverse Geocoding API: Should You Build or Buy?

Reverse Geocoding API: Should You Build or Buy?
In March 2024, a fleet management startup in Lagos called an emergency meeting. Their delivery verification system — built on Google’s reverse geocoding API — was returning addresses for only 47% of their GPS pings. The other 53% came back as "unknown" or pointed to locations kilometers away. Google’s coverage of Nigerian street addresses was simply too thin. They had two choices: build their own...

Reverse Geocoding: How to Convert Latitude and Longitude to Address

Reverse Geocoding: How to Convert Latitude and Longitude to Address
On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 lost both engines after striking a flock of geese over the Bronx. Captain Sullenberger glided the Airbus A320 to a dead-stick landing on the Hudson River. Within 90 seconds, the first rescue boats were en route. Not because someone radioed a street address — there is no street address in the middle of the Hudson. Because the aircraft’s transponder broadc...

How to Convert Any Address on Earth to Coordinates

How to Convert Any Address on Earth to Coordinates
This is Part 4 of our Address to Coordinates series. Read [Link: Part 1: Will Geocoding Decide the War Between Humans and AI? | /blog/address-to-coordinates-geocoding-ai-war], [Link: Part 2: The House Number Problem | /blog/house-number-problem-geocoding], and [Link: Part 3: 200 Countries, 200 Ways to Write an Address | /blog/200-countries-address-formats-geocoding] for the full context. You’ve re...

200 Countries, 200 Ways to Write an Address

200 Countries, 200 Ways to Write an Address
This is Part 3 of our Address to Coordinates series. Read [Link: Part 1: Will Geocoding Decide the War Between Humans and AI? | /blog/address-to-coordinates-geocoding-ai-war] and [Link: Part 2: The House Number Problem | /blog/house-number-problem-geocoding] for the full context. Here is a number that should terrify anyone building a geocoding system: 135,000. That’s the estimated number of addres...

The House Number Problem: Why “123” Is Not What You Think

The House Number Problem: Why “123” Is Not What You Think
This is Part 2 of our Address to Coordinates series. Read [Link: Part 1: Will Geocoding Decide the War Between Humans and AI? | /blog/address-to-coordinates-geocoding-ai-war] first for the full context. A house number is the numeric or alphanumeric identifier assigned to a building on a street. It is the first component a geocoder parses when converting an address to coordinates. But across 200+ c...

Address to Coordinates: Will Geocoding Decide the War Between Humans and AI?

Address to Coordinates: Will Geocoding Decide the War Between Humans and AI?
In October 2019, I stood on stage at Big Data Ignite in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and made a prediction that got some uncomfortable laughs: the side that masters converting human addresses into machine coordinates will win the AI race. Five years later, nobody is laughing. Converting an address to coordinates — called geocoding — is the process of translating a human-readable location like "350 5th...

CSV2GEO vs Google Maps Geocoding API: An Honest Comparison

CSV2GEO vs Google Maps Geocoding API: An Honest Comparison
A geocoding API converts street addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates via HTTP requests. Google Maps and CSV2GEO are two of the most popular geocoding APIs in 2026, but they serve different use cases. Google Maps is the default choice for developers already in the Google ecosystem. CSV2GEO is built for batch processing, CSV file uploads, and teams that need affordable global coverage w...