I needed a way for users to be able to enter readable place names and do searches restricted to the neighborhood. The search API only supports lat,long so I had to implement some geocoding to translate names into coordinates. I ended up using Yahoo's free GeoPlanet service, with 50,000 requests possible per month.
Since I couldn't find any other public examples of how to do this (though I'm sure this must be in a lot of code out there) I put up my sample code: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/02/how-to-emulate-near-in-the-twitter-search-api-using-geoplanet.html It's a small PHP file, and works just like the normal search API call but with an additional near argument that gets translated by the geocoding. I'd love to see some more explanation on the docs wiki of this sort of workaround for 'near', but it seems that it's only editable by Twitter employees? Facebook's more open editing policy seems to work well for them. cheers, Pete
