Hi there! I'm not programmer, so I need your help to fill me in on how this works: There are a number of websites and mobile applications that find things like mailboxes. For example: http://www.mailboxmap.com/ I'd like to create a similar site but for other things that can be found on a map. How does one go about doing this? I mean, where does that site pull all of it's information from? Straight off of a google API? Thanks for any info you can provide!
yup, the map and all the thing related to the map (latitude, longitude, etc) it's all from the Google MAP API, and the rest like UPS info, mail box, etc, they make all the data in their own database (not straight from google) and associate all those data with the latitude and longitude or the address and then they map those location using the Google MAP API. Use google API for the mapping functionality and for the rest data, you have to build it on your own and associate it with geo position.
See http://code.google.com/apis/maps/articles/phpsqlajax.html to get an idea on how to use Google Maps API to add some markers.
Step 1 - get the locations of the data you want to provide. Like the locations of all grocery stores Step 2 - "put your junk in the box" . . . just kidding, couldn't resist Step 3 - you convert the data to use geolocation codes in latitude and longitude Step 4 - put all your data in a database Step 5 - write a piece of code to pull the info from the database and use the Google Maps API to display the actual locations. I've done this many times before, its actually quite a straightforward program.
If your looking for data I have a very large library of up to date data for the US. Some free, some not.