Latlong maps API more accurate than Google maps API

IIT Kanpur's National Geodesy Centre has verified a benchmarking study, which finds average accuracy of Latlong's Geo-coding API to be 2× better than Google Maps API.

A few months ago, our family was driving in interior Karnataka visiting several temples. We had to get directions to Goruru on the banks of Hemavathi in Hassan District. My son opened Google Maps — after driving a couple of kilometres, I sensed we were heading in the wrong direction. Google Maps had "Goruru (near Bengaluru)" and "Gorur (near Hassan)" as 2 different villages with different English spellings, when the reality is that both villages have the exact same name in Kannada — ಗೊರೂರು.

This triggered a conversation with our CTO, Rahul Sindaghatta, on how we use intuitive knowledge about place names. He pointed out that people view addresses telescopically downwards from country to house number, while addresses are written microscopically upwards. We decided to translate our 'tribal knowledge' to APIs in our platform.

Result of Benchmarking Exercise

Prof Onkar Dikshit of IIT Kanpur's National Centre of Geodesy said: "average position error pattern remains: Latlong < Google < Bing < TomTom."

• Latlong's Geocoding API: 2× better average accuracy than Google Maps API
• Latlong's API accuracy: 35× better than Microsoft Bing API
• Latlong's API accuracy: almost 200× better than TomTom API

What Are We Doing Differently — "Depth of Area"

At the heart of the API is the intuitive understanding that humans think of addresses telescopically. The most important reason this has been difficult to implement is that such 'geospatial shapes' become compute-expensive. This is where a concept of "Depth of Area" was created by our engineers to quickly select the possibility with the best match.

Latlong's strength is having curated area data (called polygons in maps) across India. Multiple possibilities of English spelling for Indian names of areas is a challenge handled beautifully — Jainagar / Jayanagara / Jayanagar all map to जयनगर (ಜಯನಗರ).