Health & Fitness
Are Search Engines Geocaching Spoilers? Lemonade Day
When life gives you lemons, make Community Lemonade in Long Beach with me. Day 73 - I did a little test about the geolocation and reverse geolocation that you can do with your everyday search engine.
. I'm taking the opportunity of this unplanned time off to connect with the many artists and creators in this wonderful city that I love. Come with me on my 100-day odyssey of art and creativity in Long Beach. I call it .
There's a website for everything. I'm planning to do some geocaching, and wondered. Can I just take the cache coordinates and plug them into some website and find the cache? Hm.
September 12th was Day 73. I learned some new terms: geocoding and reverse geocoding.
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A search on the search engine of: "find gps coordinates of an event" brings up a few sites - GPSVisualizer, Geocoder are two.
GPS Visualizer gives you the chance to enter one or many addresses and returns the GPS coordinates for that address. This is geocoding. Translating an address into GPS relevant data. There are two options on the visualizer: Yahoo! and Google.
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I was headed to the Bungalow Building for the CALB meeting yesterday, so I did a little playing around with the GPS Visualizer and Yahoo! and Google search engines.
I'll just summarize what I did, what I found, then I'll bore you with the details.
I typed in the address 727 Pine Ave, Long Beach, CA in GPS Visualizer for each of Yahoo! and Google. Then I typed in the GPS coordinates of each back into the search engines. Then I typed in the GPS coordinates of each back into the other search engine.
Yahoo! and Google return different values for the GPS coordinates of 727 Pine St, Long Beach. They are both approximations, just different approximations. I was able to find the URL in Google that would bring back the details of the address that include the GPS coordinates. I wasn't able to figure out what that was in Yahoo!
So the summary is this.
The reverse geocaching lookup in Google and Yahoo! can get you close to the address (with a map response) but you'll still need your GPS receiving device to finish up. GPS Visualizer does not perform reverse geocoding.
Personally, I am more rewarded if I am on foot for a fair amount of time and watching the numbers change on your device adds to the fun, but I could live with a search engine getting you across the street and down a bit. I'm somewhat relieved that the results of a reverse geocode are not exactly the reverse of a geocode.
Aren't you?
Tips, Tidbits, Things
GPS Visualizer Result
street address: 727 Pine Ave ZIP/postal code: 90813-4321 city: Long Beach county/district: Los Angeles County state/province: California country: United States latitude, longitude:727 Pine Ave, 90813-4321, Long Beach, Los Angeles County, California, United States
33.775746, -118.192377
33.775746 -118.192377N33° 46.5448', W118° 11.5426'
Try plugging this into the search engine "N33° 46.5448', W118° 11.5426' " on Google. It returned 700 Pine Ave. Close. The address depicted was not exactly 727 Pine, and the coordinates displayed weren't quite the same: +33° 46' 31.76", -118° 11' 32.15"
And now I'll say this. Plugging the same into Yahoo! won't get you the address. But... I'm sure I did this yesterday! If only I'd written it down!
Want more lemonade?
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Trish Tsoiasue writes as herself about creative and maker topics for and as Handmade Penguin for the Handmade Penguin Blog. She is currently playing .