I run a site for a very small community. That community is in the United States Postal Service national address database. It is not, however, the "default" city for the ZIP Code my site serves.

While the major Web sites serve all communities in the USPS database, startup sites tend not to do this. Thus, when I find a really great Web site that outshines the big sites, I inevitably have to convince the owner to manually add my city to their database before I can add them to my directory.

I just replied to the owner of a small site who was confident that their data vendor would soon add my city and everything would then be fine. I had to relate that they wouldn't be adding anything and the issue would not just resolve itself. I had just had correspondence with another site owner who complained about a large local community in California not being in the city/state/zip database he purchased and how he had to respond to thousands of complaints as a result.

IMHO, the vendors of location databases who take the USPS database and "cleanse" it are snake oil salesmen who do great damage to the Web community. Their "value added" is to remove most of the cities that are officially supported for mail delivery by the United States Postal Service. They then call this an improvement and actually have the gall to charge for it! The result is that those who fall for the ruse, end up failing to serve thousands of communities and millions of users across the entire nation.

The United States Postal Service national address database may not be perfect, but it's actively maintained and updated in near real-time. I've watched a correction post to it within minutes of my query that returned an address that failed to validate. And, after all, it is the official database that is used to deliver mail for the nation, with representatives covering essentially every square inch of it!