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7/15/2026
I turned a public-domain government CSV into a searchable index of every port and airport on Earth

I turned a public-domain government CSV into a searchable index of every port and airport on Earth

Short summary

A developer built a free, no-signup directory of 3,804 seaports and 9,640 airports from three public-domain government datasets (NGA World Port Index, UN/LOCODE, OurAirports). The article covers real-world data cleaning challenges like embedded newlines in CSVs, bogus depth values, and zeros meaning 'unknown,' plus a cross-modal nearest-port-to-airport graph. It also shares a hard-won lesson on programmatic SEO: index only high-quality pages first to avoid Google's thin-content penalty.

  • •Combined NGA, UN/LOCODE, and OurAirports public-domain data into a free 13,000+ entry port and airport directory
  • •Data cleaning challenges included embedded CSV newlines, offshore oil terminal depth anomalies, and zero-as-unknown fields
  • •Programmatic SEO lesson: index only ~400 top pages per vertical first, keep long tail as noindex/follow to avoid thin-content penalties

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.

#open-source#ai-tools
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