I like to use both and I’d seriously give Michelin a try, I just find the Google one easier to develop with, though I’m no freelance developer.

This means postcode searches are very in-accurate. The proximity search is very poor, even for town searches, often not recognising locations.

This is why Google have a premier and a enterprise solution which still is more expensive and not as good as business mapping specialists like bing and Via Michelin who also have API’s and provide distance calculation.
Remember the solution you use on google.com is not the same one they supply to business, it’s just a Basic service with serious flaws and bugs.
As a free lance developer, so serious business would use Google as the system is weak and really provides a watered down solution. I could list 100 benefits of using better providers than Google but here are some of the main ones for why I choose Bing and Via Michelin (the better of the two), accuracy, customisation, user experience, SLA, support, proximity search taking into account natural boundaries, small town recognition, detail on the map, Experienced teams and ultimately brand, who wants to spend hundreds of thousand promoting their brand to offer a solution that does not recognise locations, shows the marker in the wrong place and offers limited directions and often does not work for hours at a time? How cheap does that look and the amount of times customers will simply go elsewhere is extraordinarily high !

Larry, ViaMichelin and bing cover about 240 each and have street level for over 34 countries in Europe including Spain, Germany, UK and all the usually places, they can even Geocode Ireland, where as Google simply cannot. If you want a free solution for your small business thats fine, but in a competitive world, you simply cannot offer a poor product and get away with it anymore (why do you think MCDonalds now only use 100% beef?, it’s because Burger King did and customers wanted something better!! You have to keep up or fall behind.

I found using google to be free, easier to work with and actually just as accurate for my needs as any other – providing you get around the limitations of the API and get a direct geocode from the maps site itself (its results are far more accurate than the API request calls).

I’ve not used ViaMichelin so can’t comment on that one. What we really need is an open standard but with the Post Office being the owner (and making alot of money from sales of the data) I can’t see this happening any time soon.

In all, no professional would use Google as there are specialists such as Bing and ViaMichelin would have the full kit available for business’s

but I’ll still check into these API updates and reconfigure if necessary.

btw. I’m always around for small freelance projects…

many thanks for making your script public!

are you a freelance developer? (php/mysql/js etc) I often have too much work to do myself… let me know if you’re interested, I’m in south west London

Looks like Google now want you to use jsapi which with my code will give you an issue. When you signup for the ajax api you get a different API key, the js one rather than the one I use here. So I need to update the link I guess and the tutorial (already!)

You actually need the UDS api which I fear may be out dated and replaced in the meantime, can you post up the error you get? it should be a javascript error that states a function cant be loaded etc.. that’ll confirm its a difference in API’s.

In the mean time when I get chance I’ll try and rework the example starting with the info at:

http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/documentation/

a page where you had it working would be good, then us dumbos could take that to bits to figure out what is the difference – oh but I guess Google might decide you were doing too many queries

cant see what I’m doing wrong..

FYI: google added a ‘sensor’ variable in map query string
and your form input type should be ‘text’ not ‘textfield’ !