Posted On: Nov 16, 2021

Today, Amazon Location Service added five new parameters to help developers filter and process search results for points of interest, addresses (known as geocoding), and geographical positions (known as reverse geocoding). With these new parameters, they can tailor and optimize location results to meet the needs of their specific applications. For example, developers can choose to only select the closest search result, personalize the results to the end-user's preferred language, or enable time-related features such as turning lights on and off in a home automation application.

Four new return parameters help filter the results of searches. First, a distance measurement indicates how far each of the returned results are from the bias or exact position of their search. Second, an interpolated parameter indicates whether each resulting address is estimated based on known locations or a known location itself. Third, a relevance score is returned for customers searching for a place or point of interest, indicating how closely the returned result matches the original search text. Fourth, timezone indicates the time zone for each returned result. In addition, an input parameter, language, allows developers to specify the preferred language to use for the returned results.

Amazon Location Service is a fully managed service that helps developers easily and securely add maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, tracking, and geofencing to their applications without compromising on data quality user privacy, or cost. With Amazon Location Service, you retain control of your location data, protecting your privacy and reducing enterprise security risks. Customers using the Amazon Location Place API can search for addresses and points of interest data from our high-quality data providers Esri and HERE.

Amazon Location Service is available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

To learn more, visit to the Amazon Location Service developer guide.