My local (US) county has a web service to look up property deeds and titles.
They "solved" this problem by just having you enter the street name with no punctuation or suffix (ave, st, etc), and if there is a collision the form pops out a drop-down selector to have you disambiguate.
It's not the cleanest solution but it works. I agree that bending the humans to serve the needs of the machine feels... Sub-optimal.
To be fair, a degree of fuzziness in matching is quite valuable. Is it Eighth Ave, 8th Ave, Eighth Avenue or 8th Avenue? Or W 8th Ave, perhaps? Is that deed for Unit 7 or Apt 7 or #7 or Ste 7? Is the street address 15 8th Ave or 015 8th Ave? In cases where one zip code spans multiple cities, should anyone really be matching on the city? How about communities in a city in which no one is quite sure what goes in the city field? (Is “Pacific Palisades, CA” a valid city+state? How about Van Nuys, CA or Hollywood, CA? But don’t confuse this situation with West Hollywood, CA or Beverly Hills, CA, which are actual cities.)
I wonder what address verification services expect for the “numbers in the address” when the address is 123 1/2 4th Ave #5”.
Apostrophes seem like the least of anyone’s concerns.
My favorite confusing street I've dealt with is Boulevard in Hartford, CT[1]. Often abbreviated, so addresses like "1600 Blvd" are common. And of course there are streets where "boulevard" is the last word in the name, like usual, to add to confusion.
FWIW, I've used this API for some years. On the con side, it uses XML, but on the pro side, it's fast, reliable, and consistent. And free, at least for my volumes.
They "solved" this problem by just having you enter the street name with no punctuation or suffix (ave, st, etc), and if there is a collision the form pops out a drop-down selector to have you disambiguate.
It's not the cleanest solution but it works. I agree that bending the humans to serve the needs of the machine feels... Sub-optimal.