Frequently Asked Questions & Answers:

Latitude and Longitude:

Q: Isn't all latitude and longitude about the same?
A: No! -- a thousand times no! Almost all (if not all) of the competitive products you will find provide the lat./long. they receive from the U.S. Postal Service. Much of this data is old or incomplete! The U.S. Postal Service doesn't even use this data which they provide to our competitors in their own locator -- they use our data because it's more complete!

For instance, we have over 41,300 unique U.S. lat./long. points and over 650,000 unique Canadian points. If you've already purchased from the competition, go to our dowload page and download the GeoCount program which will prove that we have more unique points.

Also, one customer who purchased the competition's data said they had over 450 Los Angeles area zip codes with the same latitude and longitude! This will never work in real world applications. Only a few of our records have the same coordinates. They are usually for Post Office boxes with more than one zip code served by the same post office.

Download our dem data which has thousands of records for you to test with. One low-price competitor provides only a few sample records. We looked at one of their coordinates and it was off by over 650 miles! You truly would get what you pay for!

Q: What is latitude and longitude used for?
A: Latitude/Longitude is used to calculate the distance between one zip code and another. Latitude and Longitude is primarily used for locators: for finding the nearest store or dealer to your zip code. It is also used for finding all the zip codes within a certain radius.

Q: Where can I find the formula for calculating the distance between one zip code and another, or for developing a locator?
A: Please download a demo version of the file from our Download Page. With the demo, we include ‘readme’ help files, including a file called, ‘lat-long.txt’. This has the formula for calculating the distance and general logic on how to develop a locator.

Q: How many unique latitude and longitude points do you have in your data?
A: In the U.S., we currently have over 41,300 unique latitude and longitude points. For Canada, we have over 631,000 unique points. For Mexico, we have over 12,300 unique points.

Q: What format is your latitude/longitude data in?
A: The format of our Latitude/Longitude information is decimal degrees, not degrees minutes and seconds.

Q: Do you have geocodes?
A: Yes we do have geocodes. ‘Geocodes’ is just another name for a Latitude/Longitude pair.

Q: What’s a centroid? What center point do you use for each zip code?
A: A centroid is a center point. We use centroids in our zip codes. We try to use a population based centroid rather than a physical centroid when possible, since that’s where most of the people are. When this is not possible, we use a physical centroid.

Q: You have the same latitude & longitude for more than one zip code in some cities. Why?
A: When we have the same Latitude and Longitude for more than one zip code in the same city it is usually because of multiple Post Office Boxes at one location or new zip codes that just came out which we can’t map. But generally, all zip codes should have a unique Latitude/Longitude.