Coordinate precision and floating-point rounding errors
Storing or computing coordinates using the wrong numeric type can introduce rounding errors on the order of meters, entirely separate from any error in the original geocoding.
Tag
#precision
The difference between rooftop and street-level geocoding
Rooftop geocoding places a point at the actual building. Street-level geocoding interpolates a position along the road. The two look similar on a map and are not the same thing.
What "high precision" should mean for a geocoded result
Calling a result high precision means something specific. It should mean the match resolved to an exact building or point, not merely that a response came back quickly.
Confidence scoring: what goes into the number
A confidence score is not a single measurement, it is a combination of several signals about how sure a match is. Understanding those inputs makes the number far more useful.
Handle addresses with no house number
A rural address, a landmark, or a new development without an assigned house number still geocodes correctly, just at a coarser precision than a full street address.
What coordinate precision marketing gets backwards
A response with fifteen decimal places of latitude looks precise. It is not accurate just because it has more digits than the method can actually support.
Why "just use lat and lon" oversimplifies location precision
A pair of coordinates looks like the whole answer, but without knowing how they were derived, two identical-looking coordinate pairs can carry very different reliability.
Why coordinate rounding matters more than people think
Trimming decimal places on a coordinate looks harmless, but each digit represents real distance on the ground, and rounding too aggressively can move a point by meters or kilometers.
Reading the confidence and precision fields correctly
Precision tells you what kind of match you got. Confidence tells you how sure the geocoder is. Mixing up the two leads to bad filtering logic.
How we measure geocoding accuracy against known points
Accuracy claims mean nothing without a method. Here is how reference addresses with known coordinates are used to check what a geocoder actually returns.