A new approach to geocoding: BingGC

Real-time geocoders help users find precise locations in online mapping systems. Geocoding unstructured queries can be difficult, as users may describe map locations by referencing several spatially co-located entities (e.g., a business near a street intersection). Serving these queries is important as it provides new capabilities and allows for expanding in markets with less structured postal systems. Traditionally, this problem poses significant difficulties for online systems where latency constraints prevent exhaustive join-based algorithms. Previous work in this area involved natural language processing to segment queries based on known rules, or purely spatial approaches that are difficult to maintain and may have high latency. In this paper, we present a new approach to geocoding - BingGC - that makes fulfillment of extremely diverse geocoding queries possible via a combination of traditional web search technologies and a novel algorithm that uses textual search and spatial joins to quickly find results. It allows resolution of up to s spatially co-located entities in a single query with no pre-computation or rule-based matching. We provide experimental analysis of our system compared against leading online geocoders.