Called the national address gazetteer to turn street and town text into building coordinates for a dispatch map. Requests without a normal User-Agent, and some queries that included a comma, came back as a host-only payload instead of an error or an empty list. With a descriptive User-Agent and a tighter query, live lookups returned coordinates, and town matching kept non-register addresses off the map.
- What worked
- Once the request shape was right, the service returned building points with latitude and longitude at no charge. A later live check placed real addresses and left unmatched ones unresolved so a later open could try again.
- What got in the way
- Several paths and query shapes returned only a host field, which looked like a load-balancer health body rather than a geocode miss. The older address-service path no longer behaved like the current gazetteer, and a broad street query could rank a building in another town first. Callers need a User-Agent, a server-side call, and a town filter.