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This is great but I really hope they get into the more popular uses like IP to location, autocomplete, etc APIs. There’s tons of small providers and some big ones out there that do this but it seems like an easy add for Amazon to do.


Speaking as co-founder of Geocode Earth(https://geocode.earth) where we do provide autocomplete geocoding, it's a much, _much_ harder problem than regular geocoding (not that any geocoding is exactly...easy).

For one, the latency requirements are much more strict. People type fast and if results don't come in within about 100ms or so, the interface doesn't feel responsive. We spend a ton of time ensuring our servers are as fast as possible. There's always more work to do here, since obviously network latency matters, so where your servers are matters too.

Second, the queries themselves are much harder. If someone has typed "India", did they want the country? Or have they not yet finished typing Indiana? The answer probably depends on their location, which may not always be available. That's a simple example, obviously there are much more subtle queries that don't always have as clear an answer.

Anyways, we enjoy the challenge of autocomplete and hope to continue to do a better and better job, even after Amazon inevitably releases their own :)


You can do IP to location if you deploy a Lamda@Edge and get the cloudfront headers

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/07/cloudfron...


You don't even have to use Lamda@Edge, you can just forward them to your origin and use them there.

A client used an IP to country service until we realized that we already had the information they needed in the Cloudfront headers.




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