Basic Google Maps Placemarks geocode error: couldn't connect to host

That means your server can’t connect to Google’s server. It’s probably something you should talk to your host about.

To work around it, you can manually enter longitude/latitude coordinates, see the FAQ and Installation page for details.

Ian,

We are experiencing the same message. You may remember our sites (FDmaps.com) where we have 1,000s of entries.

It was working as recently as January 27, 2016.

We are running 1.10.5

Can you do some testing on your end and see if you see similar issues?

We are working up info on another state, and are stalled until this issue is resolved.

Thanks as always!

Jeff

I tested on a couple servers and it’s still working fine for me. I would suggest talking to your host and seeing what they say. To avoid them just blaming WordPress, you can ask them to run this command from the server:

curl https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Seattle&sensor=false

They should get the same couldn't connect to host error, and will be able to troubleshoot it from there. If you have SSH access to the server, you can run it yourself and maybe get more debugging info.

I contacted our host and here’s a transcript of the chat:

[email protected] [~]# curl https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Seattle&sensor=false [1] 64931 -bash: amp: command not found [email protected] [~]# {
The techs are tellign tme that the &sensor=false
is giving errors
[email protected] [~]# curl https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Seattle { “results” : [ { “address_components” : [
it works with you remove that

Hmmm, that seems odd. The sensor parameter used to be required, but now it’s optional and ignored if it’s used. So, it’s safe to remove it, but it shouldn’t hurt anything either.

I think the amp: command not found error they got was just because when the command was pasted into the terminal the first time, the & was converted to it’s equivalent HTML entity, &, and Bash interpreted the ; as a command separator.

To avoid that, either manually make sure that the & isn’t converted, or wrap the entire URL in quotes.

It should be:
curl https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Seattle&sensor=false

or

curl "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Seattle&sensor=false"

but not

curl https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Seattle&sensor=false

If the sensor parameter is actually causing problems, I’m happy to remove it, but I’m kind of skeptical that it’ll fix the problem. Could you test it out first? You’ll just need to find line 853 in core.php and change it from:

$geocodeResponse = wp_remote_get( 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address='. str_replace( ' ', '+', $address ) .'&sensor=false' );

to:

$geocodeResponse = wp_remote_get( 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address='. str_replace( ' ', '+', $address ) );

Then enter an address into BGMP again and see if it works.

(Note: I had to edit the post a couple times to get the HTML entities to display correctly, so make sure you look at the post itself, not the notification e-mail, to make sure you get the correct URLs)

Did as requested and still not working.

I’m on WP 4.4.2 (could that be it?)

Returned this error:

That address couldn’t be geocoded, please make sure that it’s correct.
Geocode response:
stdClass Object
(
[results] => Array
(
)

[status] => ZERO_RESULTS
)

My tests were on 4.4.2 also, so I don’t think that’s it.

What was the exact address that you entered when you got that error? I’ll test it and see if I can get the same results.

Also, do you get that error when you use “Chicago” as the address? That string should geocode to approximately 41.8781136, -87.6297982.

Ian,

I think I may have isolated my issue.

I have a spreadsheet I was working off of for my coordinates and previously was able to just copy/paste into the “Placemark Address” window.

The coords were in this format:

34 46 20.812 -82 21 36.09

Which are the coordinates for this address: 701 Fork Shoals Rd, Greenville, SC 29605

Which returns the coords in this format: 34.772421, -82.360140

Did Google change something and no longer accepts the degrees minutes seconds format?

Hmmm, I was under the impression that they never accepted degrees/minutes/seconds, so I’ve always used the signed degrees format.

It looks like it does work if you paste 34 46 20.812 -82 21 36.09 into https://maps.google.com, though. I was also able to reproduce the error when using DMS, but couldn’t get it working. It seems like the Maps API might only accept the signed degrees format, but I’ll have to dig into it further.

For now, you can work around the problem by using something like https://www.onlineconversion.com/map_decimaldegrees.htm to convert from DMS to signed degrees. I think it’s also a fairly simple formula, if you want to just do the conversion automatically in your spreadsheet.