[thelist] distance between webservice

Matt Warden mwarden at gmail.com
Sun Mar 19 23:02:21 CST 2006


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pete wrote:
> Every social networking site (it would seem) has the ability to tell you 
> how many miles/km you are from another person.
> 
> Is there a best practices approach to obtaining this information? Surely 
> each site doesn't maintain a table that maps relative distances between 
> each zip/postal code etc.

No, not quite. From what I've done with this, it seems the standard
method is to keep a database that maps zip codes to latitude and
longitude, and then from there distances can be calculated between two
lat/long coordinates with a little simple math.

Anyway:

http://www.google.com/search?q=zip+code+distance+calculation+web+service

- --
Matt Warden
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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