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.
- 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.