102 Part II — Instant Gratification
You should therefore use a geocoding service if it is available because these provide a more
reliable interface to the information. Geocoding, rather than scraping, is also more suitable in
large-volume situations, for example, when adding geocoding data to a very large customer
database.Wrapping Up
Geocoding your existing address data makes it significantly easier to use your existing location
database with Google Maps. The techniques demonstrated in this chapter could be adapted to
update an entire address database with latitude/longitude information, for example. The same
techniques could also be used to introduce an additional step into a data update process that auto-
matically looks up the information when an address is added to the system. How you use the
information you have obtained is up to you and the needs of your application. Numerous exam-
ples throughout the book show how the information can be portrayed within a Google Map.