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Changes for the calculated distance column...

It just occurred to me that the distance shown in search results is the difference of the latitude and longtitude between the listing poster's location and your current location.. which is great if we could drive in a straight line (lol).. but most folks might be more interested in actual driving distance... I'm thinking we might want to make what the distance column shows as an option in the user profile settings (geographical versus driving distance for example).

rodww, 19.07.2012, 07:25
Response from the site administrator
jamonjoo, 19.07.2012
According to the Google Maps API Terms of Service you are required display a Google map when using the Google Maps API (including driving distance calculations). see: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html

... But even if possible, having to do that for every one of the possible 1,000,000's of listings for EVERY search would kill the server and make it expensive to run. ;)

This might be possible in the future if I can find a 3rd party service to calculate distance for all user as a listing is being saved, then cache the results, but then each new user needs to have it calculated also, so back to square one.

[Edit:] After some thought, usually directions are a series of right angles, so calculating one big right angle should get a good approximation.
Idea status: scheduled

Comments

rodww, 22.07.2012, 05:40
That's good then.. I guess we should just add a line to the disclaimer about distance that its an approximate value and not guaranteed to be 100% accurate to cover ourselves...
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