thanks Kesuke for your reply, I have considered all of your options, let me tell you a bit about my project
We provide a online way for restaurant to receive orders, most of orders are to be delivered, we have just started in New York City but gaining more clients in different states (Tri State area) Our competitors provide restaurant a way to calculate distance based on blocks which i'm trying to figure out how, I know that Google APIs can help with it because when I use it myself for directions sometimes it tells me how far is that place in blocks (specially in Manhattan area) Giving an estimated length for every block is not a good idea, for example mid town Manhattan have streets in numbers and avenues, the blocks between each street are almost half way shorter than ones between avenues, so given a fixed length for all block isn't practical on the other hand my current solution works based on Miles, which started to cause problems, for example restaurants located in Mid Town Manhattan are not that far from West New York (that is New Jersey state) and sometimes would fall within delivery area if it's only 2 miles radius, yet these restaurants cannot deliver to another state also validating addresses based on zip codes is not going to give accurate results for the same above reason, one restaurant go across different zip areas for delivery just because they are near to them, others are not. I'm thinking of having different solutions for different cities and/or states based on its nature of streets and distances, but the more markets we gain the worse customized development need to be made, i dont want to end up trying to develop my own Google Maps lol can you elaborate more on your second idea "i*f it is a small number, I would simply create a bounding box **encompassing the area which that store will deliver to. Then test to **see if the customers lat/lng address is within that area.*" thank you again -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps JavaScript API v3" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-maps-js-api-v3/-/WTUlYgUnssQJ. To post to this group, send email to google-maps-js-api-v3@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-maps-js-api-v3+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3?hl=en.
