Searching Best Practices

Explanation

There’s many things you can do to help improve your search experience. Here’s a few helpful tips which can help improve matching quality.

Include a Postcode

The number one way to improve your searching results is to include a postcode. There are no drawbacks whatsoever, and the benefits are significant. First, the search is much more likely to be accurate. Second, the search will be significantly faster as Naurt will only need to search that postcode area.

For example “Västgötagatan 15, Alingsås, Sverige” would be much better if the postcode was included like “Västgötagatan 15, 441 43 Alingsås, Sverige”, it would be much better.

Use the Country Field

In the search Query, you have the opportunity to specify the country. You can use any of the two digit ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 codes listed on the coverage page, an example might be

{
  "address_string": "32 Thames St, Windsor SL4 1PS",
  "country": "UK"
}

The benefit of doing this is it instructs the API to only search within that specified country. This means significantly faster search, and the result is guaranteed to be within the specified country. However, the drawback is if the address you are searching for is not in the specified country it will never be found. Please ensure you use this powerful feature correctly.

Use a Full Address

Naurt’s data is optimised for deliveries. Therefore, Naurt will never return things like a whole street, a town, city, postcode, or a country. Naurt will only return specific addresses which can be delivered to.

Here’s some examples of searches which won’t perform very well in Naurt :

• SE21 8JX (just a postcode)
• London (just a city)
• Lovelace Road, London (a street)
• Lovelace Road, London, SE21 8JX (despite being very easily matchable with the postcode, this still doesn’t identify a delivery location)
• United Kingdom (just a country)

Here’s some examples of specific delivery addresses:

• 28 Lovelace Road, London, SE21 8JX
• 99 Rue de Clignancourt, 75018 Paris
• Rua Joaquim Palhares, 585, apto. 202, Praca Da Bandeira - RJ, 20260-080, Brazil
• 159 Duane St, Apt 4, New York, NY 10013, United States

Assess the Search Confidence

Each response for a forward geocode contains a search_confidence. It falls between 0 and 1, where 1 is the best match possible and 0 is a bad match. This can be very useful for filtering out any poor search results. Some people may want a stricter search than others so for this reason, we don’t automatically filter out bad search results. We suggest testing the final-destination API with your own difficult or bad addresses and seeing which level of filtering works for you.

Review Your Strictness

When using Final Destination V2, you can set the input_filter strictness in the options (note, this is in the global options for a request, not per query).

input_filter helps in some cases with low quality inputs. For example, if you are not collecting addresses and instead get them from a third party (like, an online shop which doesn’t check address completeness) you can set this to strict. This will filter out the worst address inputs. For instance,

• SE21 8JX
• London
• United Kingdom

Would all be filtered out. If you expect a lot of bad inputs, this option can be good, since it’s easier to deal with poor addresses before delivery drivers have left the warehouse.