Question regarding searching

Question

I am planning to develop a small desktop stand alone application most probably using C#. My application need to return the address of the place that i am going to search. For example searching for "Big Ben" will return the result " Palace of Westminster, House of Commons, London SW1A OAA, United Kingdom " . Planning to search and get the result from the web. Would like to seek advice on how to approach in developing this application.

Answer 1

I would suggest Yahoo! PlaceFinder: http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placefinder/

(Examples with C# - http://developer.yahoo.com/dotnet/howto-xml_cs.html)

It is incredibly simple to use with WebClient and has a more generous API limit than Google's.

Answer 2

I would suggest looking up for a maps implementation in C# similar to Google Maps, where the places are mapped to coordinates or grouped by location/type/proximity in some form of a hierarchical tree structure. Store them in some database if this lookup table does not already exist somewhere on the net (which I believe it should with the current proliferation of mapping web applications to pull say xml data off) using lat-longs cause these are unique for any geographical location. maybe Google Geolocation API? there seems to be a multitude of options really. Just don't go off hashing say the location names that aren't unique and may become terribly long, or things may go horribly wrong.