Converting database of coordinates to physical addresses

Question

I'm trying to make a real estate agency website and got an idea of saving addresses as coordinates to database (because text addresses can be difficult)

So I have two main questions:

1) Is it possible to search objects by street if their addresses are saved as coordinates? And how difficult is it? Maybe you could give a working example in any web-programming language or advise a good walkthrough.

2) Is it a feasible approach? Maybe it has awful drawbacks I don't see.

Answer 1

Yes, it is in fact possible to convert the latitude and longitude of a location into an address. This is achieved through the Google Maps Reverse Geocoding service through the Javascript API.

Take a look at this site to read up a bit more on reverse geocoding and how you could make it work for your project.

Here is a code sample of a reverse geocoding request: Live example here

 function geocodeLatLng(geocoder, map, infowindow) {
    var input = document.getElementById('latlng').value;
    var latlngStr = input.split(',', 2);
    var latlng = {lat: parseFloat(latlngStr[0]), lng: parseFloat(latlngStr[1])};
    geocoder.geocode({'location': latlng}, function(results, status) {
      if (status === 'OK') {
        if (results[0]) {
          map.setZoom(11);
          var marker = new google.maps.Marker({
            position: latlng,
            map: map
          });
          infowindow.setContent(results[0].formatted_address);
          infowindow.open(map, marker);
        } else {
          window.alert('No results found');
        }
      } else {
        window.alert('Geocoder failed due to: ' + status);
      }
    });
  }