The new Mapbox search service, Search Box API, is the easiest way to add interactive location search to connected cars, micro-mobility services, delivery apps, and more. The Search Box API puts hundreds of millions of global places and addresses at your users' fingertips.

Ensure a fast, intuitive location search experience for users

The Mapbox Search Box API improves one of the most common user interactions with any location-based feature: Finding a location on a map. Whether it’s looking for the nearest coffee shop, navigating to a pick-up address, or finding a gas station along a route, map users need a comprehensive, fast, and consistent search experience. And developers want location search technology that is straightforward to implement and easy to maintain, without the hassle of dealing with ever-changing and complex location data. The new Mapbox Search Box API improves the search experience for both developers and end-users. 

Already, Mapbox customers Toyota, General Motors, ANWB, and Straightaway are building with the Search Box API to enhance the navigation experience for connected vehicles and companion apps for drivers and deliveries.

"The Mapbox Search Box API helped us to improve the search feature in the ANWB Onderweg driver app. Now our members can search all of Mapbox data for place names, addresses, and points of interest to prepare their route, and at the same time we can add our own custom data to further enhance the driver experience."

- Franklin Snellink, Software Engineer, ANWB

Search Box adds top requested capabilities to Mapbox search

The Mapbox Geocoding API has long been used by developers to turn addresses to coordinates and coordinates to addresses. With the Search Box API, developers can easily create an autocomplete search experience that makes it easier for users to find not only addresses, but also points of interest (POIs), categories of POIs, street names, neighborhoods, localities, place names, districts, postcodes, regions, and countries. The Search Box API makes it possible to search for a specific restaurant down the street, an address in another country, or browse entire categories of results, like coffee shops, hotels, and bookstores.

The Search Box API accounts for the user’s intent and ranks results accordingly; for example, when it appears that a user is searching for the POI category of “café” and not a specific cafe, the API will return first the option to search for all cafés nearby and then list other relevant nearby results. Search Box API offers location biasing and fuzzy search that work together to create a more engaging and relevant search experience. The ranking and suggestion algorithms improve continuously as map users interact with the Mapbox search service every day.

Search Box also allows users to search for results in relation to a planned route with the Search Along Route feature, which recommends results based on proximity to a travel path. Developers can use Mapbox Directions API to retrieve the preview geometry for a route and pass this information to Search Box API to prioritize results closest to the planned route.

Mapbox data powers a reliable and easy-to-implement search experience

The Search Box API serves over 340 million addresses and 170 million POIs on a global scale. Mapbox data processing infrastructure supports reliable results powered by a continuously improving dataset that combines multiple sources, daily reviews and updates by Mapbox data quality experts, and enhancements based on user feedback. 

Any website or application can now integrate the Search Box API to create a custom location search. By design, the Search Box API simplifies the developer experience, integrating seamlessly with map and navigation features to return detailed and relevant location results directly from Mapbox.

To get started with the Search Box API, visit our new product page and documentation. Mapbox has also built SDKs, libraries, and drop-in UI components to simplify integrating Search Box API functionality into your application.  

Developers can test the various Search Box API parameters and inspect API requests and responses with our interactive playground here.