An approach is provided for providing a user with a ranked list of possible physical addresses in response to an address submitted by the user. An address submitted by a user is parsed and a number of possible candidate addresses are generated from the user provided address. The quality of the candidate addresses is ranked according to the quality of their individual address elements and factors applied to these elements. An overall quality score for each candidate address is thereby derived. The list of candidate address is displayed to the user according to overall quality score ranking.