Hi everyone,
following on from our announcement a few months back of several significant improvements to our geosearch / autosuggest widget, I am pleased to report another major improvement: our geosearch / autosuggest widget now supports searching for postcodes!
In some countries postcodes are how a huge portion of end users think about location. Supporting them natively means fewer dropped queries and a smoother experience for everyone.
No changes required for existing customers
This update is live and applied automatically. If you’re already using Geosearch, your integration will handle postcode queries without any code changes.
Many thanks to the customers who pushed us to make this significant improvement.
One point to note, there are a few countries for which we don’t (yet!) support postcode searching:
-
Brazil (BR) - has very precise postcodes (one per house) and OSM coverage is not yet great.
-
Canada (CA) - has very precise postcodes (one per house) and OSM coverage is not yet great, postcodes are not publicly available data.
-
China (CN) - OSM coverage is not yet great
-
Ireland (IE) - has very precise postcodes (one per house) and OSM coverage is not yet great, postcodes are not publicly available data.
Given the current poor coverage we thought it would be more confusing than helpful to add the postcodes we have for those countries. Hopefully we can add them in the near future. If you are inone of those countries, the best thing you can do is start adding postcodes to OpenStreetMap.
Please give it a try and let us know what you think. As always the simplest way to play with the service is on our Geosearch demo page.
One final note - our geosearch Agent Skill, which you can share with your coding agent to simplify integrating geosearch, has been adjusted accordingly.
Happy geosearching (from 10437, Germany),