What is considered a geocode?

Question

I'm working on an application that includes the Google Maps API, and I'm worried about the 2500-day geocode restriction. This is not clearly defined to me on what is considered a geocode. For instance:

• I can get my current location from my GPS, but when I show these latitude and longitude coordinates in MapView, is this considered one of them?
• Obtaining an address from a number of coordinates for confidence
• I assume that the direction from point A to B is considered a geocode?

I want to display a bunch of hardcoded coordinates on my MapView, but if there are 30, will it be considered 30 geocodes? Also, if I update the location of my users' GPS users on MapView every 5 seconds, will each update also be considered a geocode? I want to make it possible for users to get directions from their current GPS location to one of the points, which, I assume, also occupy the geocode. If I rigidly set a point, getting directions from one set of coordinates to another set, use a geocode?

I could see that my application is reaching the geocode limit with 10 users ... which seems wrong. Can someone give me a clear explanation of what does / does not consider? And any tricks to reduce the number of geocodes that I make will also be useful, thanks.

Answer 1

According to this: http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2010/03/introducing-new-google-geocoding-web.html you are allowed 2500 requests per day for each IP address, therefore, if requests from different users on different devices, then you should be fine, if they do not all make 2500 requests per day.

Answer 2

If your 30 points do not move, you only need to get them once and save them.

If you get longitude and latitude from GPS and do not convert them to an address, just use it as psoition on the map, it does not use geocode at all.

Answer 3

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/

Any HTTP request using the Google API as defined in the link above