More on saved map security...

Under normal circumstances using BatchGeocode.com, your data is never stored. In fact your data is sent directly to Yahoo Maps and is never stored anywhere along with the other datain your batch file except in your PC's memory.

However, when you use the "Save Map to a Web Page" button, we do save your information to a database. Does this mean its on the internet for everyone to see? Not necessarily.

The resulting page is URL identified by a 128 bit 32 character MD5 hash. The Hash is guaranteed to be unique to that map. You can read more about MD5 here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5 

The basic skinny of it is though, it would be near impossible for someone to brute force guess the MD5 hash for any URL on our site. Believe me our servers would be dying long before anyone got close with the number of attempts it would take (there are 309,485,009,821,345,068,724,781,056 possible keys.)

We also don't post these URLs anywhere, if they get picked up by Google or other search engines it must be because you posted it somewhere on the internet. 

So, the security of your page is in your own hands. Think of the URL itself as a password.

New Geocoding for European Countries

Yahoo Maps Added Recently added support for geocoding in Europe. Now you can geocode and get map coordinates for these countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, France, and Italy

It appears there is somewhat limited support for these countries: Albania, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia/Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Turkey

I've tried geocoding international addresses in these countries with our batch geocoder and it worked great! Just use the "State" field as a country when geocoding outside of the U.S. / Canada. Here's a few addresses I tried and got back street block level coordinates:

• France
• Spain
• United Kingdom
  
• Italy

However it should work for all countries listed above. Please test this with your own data and post back your findings here.

Faster Geocoding

Thanks to SR of http://www.cheapps.org for a performance tip: Turn off visbility on the bottom textarea field before Geocoding begins to speed things up.

Before Firefox 2.0 I didn't find a big performance difference with updating the TextArea field in real-time and displaying it. Looked "cool" to me so I kept it. But when Firefox 2 came out they added a spell check feature to all textarea fields and the spellcheck process seems to slowdown writes to the textarea field when a lot of data is used.

Anyway, thanks for the tip!

New Feature: Different Colored Markers / Grouping

As of last night I've added the ability for map markers to be colored based on a "Group" field. You can create up to 6 different values for the Group field and each will display in a different color. A legend will be added below the map that shows the description of each group and the color of the markers in that group.

The colors are: orange, blue, green, purple, red, and yellow.

You can enable this feature by selecting a "Group By" column when creating your map. If you do not wish to group by a certain field, do not include a "Group" column in your source data and/or select "Don't Group" in the Map Fields section.

For awhile now people have been asking for a way to change marker color. I think this is the most straightforward way to allow maps with different categories of markers. Here is an example map showing multiple groupings:

Apple Stores Grouping Example

Let me know if you have any feedback for this feature by posting comments below. Thanks!

New Feature: Lettered Labels for Markers

Lots of people have requested this one, sorry for taking so long to implement it. Now maps containing 26 addresses or less will be labeled with alphabet characters on the map, and in the text below on the saved map page.

This way you can print out the map and take it with you! Here's an example using our favorite map of Apple Stores in New York.

Feel free to post any constructive comments you have about this feature on the blog.

Geocode your addresses then convert to a shapefile in ArcMap

Found this great guide for using our batch geocoder and ArcMap to create a new shapefile.

Google Serves up Geocoding, including Europe and Japan

Well Google has unleashed their own geocoding service, with a 50,000 per key per day limit. They are even offering up street level geocoding in several countries in Europe and Asia. We will have to see if Yahoo will have an answer, but in the meantime I think I will try to cobble together an interface to this so that international users can get the batch geocoding goodness themselves.