What is an address? covered the data model. This article goes the other way: a tour of address shapes that consistently break parsers and resolvers, with concrete examples for each. If you are building or evaluating a geocoder, this is the failure-mode catalogue worth keeping next to your test suite.
Not every geocoder query is an address. A large fraction of real-world searches ask for points of interest — named places, categories of things, brands, landmarks, and transit infrastructure. "Find the nearest gas station" is not an address. "Where is the Eiffel Tower?" is not an address. "Show me every Hilton in Manhattan" is not an address.
The falsehoods
This article series is inspired by and cites Michael Tandy's excellent, exhaustive original — the canonical catalogue of address falsehoods, maintained since 2013. Tandy's article is a taxonomy of assumptions that break parsers, validators, and databases. This series expands on that taxonomy, adding historical context on how geocoders have handled (or failed to handle) each category, and what Mailwoman's neural approach changes.
The falsehoods
A franchise query names a specific chain or brand. The user doesn't want the nearest restaurant — they want the nearest McDonalds. The brand name is the query, and the geocoder's job is to resolve it to one or more specific locations.
Users do not type addresses the way gazetteers store them. They type what they know, in the order they think of it, with the spellings their keyboard supports, trusting autocomplete suggestions they didn't verify. A parser that only handles well-formed addresses fails on real input.
A regional variant is a local term for an amenity, brand, or category that differs from the global or standard name. "Servo" means gas station in Australia. "Bodega" means corner store in New York City. "マクド" (makudo) means McDonalds in the Kansai region of Japan. In their region, these are the standard — the everyday word millions of people reach for, every bit as legitimate as the global name.
A postcode is a routing instruction, not a geographic area. It tells a postal service how to sort and deliver mail. It does not tell a geocoder where a building is, what municipality it belongs to, or what polygon contains it. Confusing these two things is the most common error in address geocoding — and the source of a surprising fraction of production bugs.