This is a proof-of-concept address autocomplete web service written in Go and backed by Elasticsearch that can support "typeahead" for address search fields in applications. Read [my blog post] for more details and check out the demo.
You'll need Go and ElasticSearch.
Get this repo (don't clone!):
go get -d davewalk.net/address-autocomplete
To create the index, custom analzyer and address mapping:
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/davewalk/address-autocomplete
./index.sh
And to populate the database:
export AUTOCOMPLETE_FILE=/home/user/path/to/csv/file
cd index/
go build
./index
and make yourself a sandwich because that'll take a while.
NOTE: If your Elasticsearch instance isn't running at localhost:9200, you'll have to change references to it in the main.go and index/main.go files.
From the main directory:
go build
export AUTOCOMPLETE_PORT=8000 [or whatever]
./address-autocomplete
The resource is at /autocomplete and it takes two query parameters: q and num (optional). q is a string that you are trying to get address suggestions for and num is the number of suggestions that you want (25 max, 10 default). For example:
http://localhost:8000/autocomplete?q=1234 m&q=15
The API can be made more effective by:
- Street name aliasing (ie. "NINTH" -> "9TH")
- Matching on misspellings (ie. "MAKRET" -> "MARKET") (via n-grams?)
- Weighting of returned results by some additional attribute of each address (street type? ie. "minor" vs. "major" streets). This requires GIS to do and I didn't feel like it at the time. If someone wanted to attach street centerline classes to each row in the data and send me a pull request that would be awesome! Pretty please?
Pull requests accepted!
MIT