In a previous post I covered how you could use the Google Maps Api to complete and parse addresses for subsequent mapping directly from Excel.
In the name of fairness, I implemented the same thing using Bing Maps.
These restful apis work in pretty much the same way, Here are the main differences.
- Microsoft require you to get a Key to use Bing. In this downloadable example, I am using my key. If you use this code for anything, please get your own and follow the Microsoft rules on usage. Google do not require you to get a key, but limit your usage to a small number of queries daily.
- Bing is less able to deal with amibuity. In the set of 10 random addresses, Bing was unable to identify half of them. Google got them all.
- There is a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff about copyright, and other junk that is returned from each query to Bing. What a waste of space and traffic.
- Bing provides less detail than Google, but the results are a lot easier to deal with.
- Bing is fussy about input – for example I needed to clean the input addresses to get rid of non printable characters and so on. Google doesn’t care about that.
- Bing Maps has a stupid name.
There you have it. You can download the example which has both versions implemented here and judge for yourself.
All feedback and questions are welcome at our forum.
Bruce
