U.S. zipcodes

W

wnowak1

Registered
I'm looking for information on building a database for zip codes and major cities to use in my website.

For example, I'd like to have the option of searching within 10, 20, or 50 miles from zipcode 60650 as an example. To be more specific, what procedure is determined that a person living in town smallville is 50 miles away from area code 60040 ?

Any help is greatly appreciated.
 
While I can't remember off the top of my head, but you can find scripts that do this and databases of this information, however, the database info is going to cost you some money. I have yet to find anything that will do this that was free. The scripts might be free (like PHP or whatever) but the database info is what costs.

Check out http://www.hotscripts.com for possible solutions.

Scott
 
Yep -- ZIP Codes, blockgroups, census tracts, and data similar to that is usually sold, since it takes some work to set up a database with that kind of information.

The USPS compiles this kind of data and sells it from their website:

http://www.usps.com/ncsc/faq/#3

If you could get a ZIP code list along with the associated ZIP centroid, you could use the great circle distance formula to calculate distances between the centroids, which would approximate distance between ZIPs... it would be relatively simple to do with PHP or some other scripting language, like ScottW said.

We do this routinely at work, but our data comes from a company called MapInfo... if you're willing to pay for the data, their data is second-to-none.
 
Thanks for the response guys. I'll look into your suggestions. I expected the data to cost... wonder how much though ;-)
 
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