Reverse GeoCoder:Best Practices
Rural Addresses and SE01
For every Latitude/Longitude request, the Reverse GeoCoder Web Service performs a geospacial proximity search against the underlying database of known locations. Given the requested search distance, the engine will incrementally increase the radius until a location is found or the maximum distance is reached. In a practical sense, the engine grabs clusters of known points and measures the distance for each point in the cluster as it increases that radius. In rural areas, the engine may not return any locations until it reaches an urban center – a large city for example, with thousands of valid locations. At this time the service may time out and return a response code: SE01. It could not perform all the calculations and determine the nearest location before the service timed out.
Other Considerations
The expectations for rural areas may lead you to increase the max distance, which in turn may not return any valid location or until it reaches an urban cluster with many. The solution may actually be to decrease the search radius, or evaluate the SE01 result code, because in most use cases – if the nearest possible location is an unreasonable distance for business purposes it may be just as important that the input coordinates are flagged as GE51 (no locations within the distance) as opposed to returning an address 50 miles away.