GC knows where I am. So why don't the maps?

[+Pink Paisley]

Sorry is this has been covered elsewhere, but I am getting a bit fed up with the US-centric nature of this site.

 

I am in the UK. Groundspeak know that. When I open search by map my house is centre of the map.

 

So I search for 'York'. Now, York is an ancient city in the north of England with a population of 200,000. It has been there for many, many years - since 71 A.D. in fact. In fact, it is likely that all the other 'Yorks' in the world are named after this one. It is about 150 miles from my home.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/York_Shambles.jpg/170px-York_Shambles.jpg

 

There are 56 caches within a mile of the centre of the city.

 

But Groundspeak seem to think that I might be interested in York, Alabama which has a population of under 3,000 and one cache placed on the boundary of the place. And it is a micro.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/DowntownYorkAlabama.jpg/250px-DowntownYorkAlabama.jpg

 

I am not asking for The Rest of the World to take over - I understand that the biggest caching community is in the US (but just remember - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxing).

 

Come on Groundspeak. Get a grip.

 

PP

[+NYPaddleCacher]

Sorry is this has been covered elsewhere, but I am getting a bit fed up with the US-centric nature of this site.

 

I am in the UK. Groundspeak know that. When I open search by map my house is centre of the map.

 

So I search for 'York'. Now, York is an ancient city in the north of England with a population of 200,000. It has been there for many, many years - since 71 A.D. in fact. In fact, it is likely that all the other 'Yorks' in the world are named after this one. It is about 150 miles from my home.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/York_Shambles.jpg/170px-York_Shambles.jpg

 

There are 56 caches within a mile of the centre of the city.

 

But Groundspeak seem to think that I might be interested in York, Alabama which has a population of under 3,000 and one cache placed on the boundary of the place. And it is a micro.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/DowntownYorkAlabama.jpg/250px-DowntownYorkAlabama.jpg

 

I am not asking for The Rest of the World to take over - I understand that the biggest caching community is in the US (but just remember - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxing).

 

Come on Groundspeak. Get a grip.

 

PP

 

This is probably something the Groundspeak has no control over. Most likely they're using a service such as geonames or GNIS to do reverse geocoding. A reverse geocoding service will accept a string and return the most likely result with lat/long coordinates. I've done some application development myself for location name disambiguation that uses the geonames service. However, I'm using an auto suggest mechanism such that when you type in a location name it will return a list of possible matches in a select list. Click on the one you want and it returns a full "record" about that location including the lat/long coordinates. Rather than assume York means the oldest York in the world, an autosuggest mechanism would all those that live in York in the UK, or York in Alabama, or York in Pennsylvania to specify which one they want.

[+DanPan]

Just enter "York, UK" and you will find what you expect.

[+StarBrand]

Sorry is this has been covered elsewhere, but I am getting a bit fed up with the US-centric nature of this site.

 

I am in the UK. Groundspeak know that. When I open search by map my house is centre of the map.

 

So I search for 'York'. Now, York is an ancient city in the north of England with a population of 200,000. It has been there for many, many years - since 71 A.D. in fact. In fact, it is likely that all the other 'Yorks' in the world are named after this one. It is about 150 miles from my home.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/York_Shambles.jpg/170px-York_Shambles.jpg

 

There are 56 caches within a mile of the centre of the city.

 

But Groundspeak seem to think that I might be interested in York, Alabama which has a population of under 3,000 and one cache placed on the boundary of the place. And it is a micro.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/DowntownYorkAlabama.jpg/250px-DowntownYorkAlabama.jpg

 

I am not asking for The Rest of the World to take over - I understand that the biggest caching community is in the US (but just remember - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxing).

 

Come on Groundspeak. Get a grip.

 

PP

 

This is probably something the Groundspeak has no control over. Most likely they're using a service such as geonames or GNIS to do reverse geocoding. A reverse geocoding service will accept a string and return the most likely result with lat/long coordinates. I've done some application development myself for location name disambiguation that uses the geonames service. However, I'm using an auto suggest mechanism such that when you type in a location name it will return a list of possible matches in a select list. Click on the one you want and it returns a full "record" about that location including the lat/long coordinates. Rather than assume York means the oldest York in the world, an autosuggest mechanism would all those that live in York in the UK, or York in Alabama, or York in Pennsylvania to specify which one they want.

 

This is the most likely case. Nothing about your home coordinates is passed to the service - just what you type in.

[+Gitchee-Gummee]

Sorry is this has been covered elsewhere, but I am getting a bit fed up with the US-centric nature of this site.

 

I am in the UK. Groundspeak know that. When I open search by map my house is centre of the map.

 

So I search for 'York'. Now, York is an ancient city in the north of England with a population of 200,000. It has been there for many, many years - since 71 A.D. in fact. In fact, it is likely that all the other 'Yorks' in the world are named after this one. It is about 150 miles from my home.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/York_Shambles.jpg/170px-York_Shambles.jpg

 

There are 56 caches within a mile of the centre of the city.

 

But Groundspeak seem to think that I might be interested in York, Alabama which has a population of under 3,000 and one cache placed on the boundary of the place. And it is a micro.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/DowntownYorkAlabama.jpg/250px-DowntownYorkAlabama.jpg

 

I am not asking for The Rest of the World to take over - I understand that the biggest caching community is in the US (but just remember - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxing).

 

Come on Groundspeak. Get a grip.

 

PP

 

This is probably something the Groundspeak has no control over. Most likely they're using a service such as geonames or GNIS to do reverse geocoding. A reverse geocoding service will accept a string and return the most likely result with lat/long coordinates. I've done some application development myself for location name disambiguation that uses the geonames service. However, I'm using an auto suggest mechanism such that when you type in a location name it will return a list of possible matches in a select list. Click on the one you want and it returns a full "record" about that location including the lat/long coordinates. Rather than assume York means the oldest York in the world, an autosuggest mechanism would all those that live in York in the UK, or York in Alabama, or York in Pennsylvania to specify which one they want.

 

This is the most likely case. Nothing about your home coordinates is passed to the service - just what you type in.

You have a fair gripe but yes, it is misdirected. Geocaching.com is not to fault.

It doesn't happen just to you because of York. This type of incident is common in the U.S. Even using the state abbreviation in conjunction with the city name does not provide one with the desired results.

[knowschad]

You can blame Google for that (actually, Google returned the map for York, PA when I searched for it). Groundspeak is simply using the Google API on the cache search page.

 

Incidentally... a nice trick to know about is that you can type almost anything into the Address search box, and if Google will find a map for it, so will Groundspeak. For example, you can enter a full coordinate string into the address box instead of having to break it down into the N/S__ ___.___ E/W___. __.___ parts like you do for the coordinate boxes. You can enter the name of a park that Google knows about. Probably much more. Give it a try!

[+Pink Paisley]

Just enter "York, UK" and you will find what you expect.

 

I know, but that isn't really the point I am making.

 

I would expect to have to enter 'York, AL, USA' if that is what I wanted from here in the UK, but for an organisation who's whole business is about maps and location not to have worked round that one is odd / thoughtless / lazy / whatever.

 

Letchworth (2 miles from home here in the UK), gets me Letchworth Arkasas.

 

And every now and then, I have the right to be just a bit grumpy and unreasonable.

 

PP

[jri]

Actually, having done a bit of research into this, I think it is something that Groundspeak can and should improve on.

 

This is probably something the Groundspeak has no control over. Most likely they're using a service such as geonames or GNIS to do reverse geocoding. A reverse geocoding service will accept a string and return the most likely result with lat/long coordinates.

This is the most likely case. Nothing about your home coordinates is passed to the service - just what you type in.

 

With the old beta maps, the search function used Google's geocoding API. With the new maps, they host their own geocoder on the geocaching.com servers. I don't know whether they've got their own database, or if this is just a front end for another service, but I suspect the latter (if it was their own, couldn't it do fun stuff like searching for caches by GC code?)

 

Most of the main geocoding services allow the results to be biased to a given location. Yahoo! PlaceFinder can limit results to a particular country, as can Geonames (which can also prioritise rather than limit). The Google Geocoding API can bias searches for a given region or set of coordinates.

 

If Groundspeak is using one of these services, they have the potential to use these features to improve our search results.

 

I have tested this out by writing a userscript that uses Geonames to check which country is being viewed, then do a search biased to that country. If you're looking at England and search for "Birmingham", you get the one in the Midlands, but if you were looking at America, you get the one in Alabama. You can still search for a specific one (e.g. "Birmingham, AL" or "Birmingham England"), but this should give better first-time results more of the time. If the search can't find anything relevant in Geonames, it hands back to the normal search engine, so you can still type in zip/postal codes and other search terms.

[+Mallah]

Duplicated!

Edited April 19, 2012 by mike142sl

[+dprovan]

Sorry is this has been covered elsewhere, but I am getting a bit fed up with the US-centric nature of this site.

If it makes you feel any better, I've tried to find things here in the U.S. and been shown something in Germany, so it's not "US-centric" so much as "occasionally quite wrong."

[+StarBrand]

Give it complete information and it works - give it guessable information and it guesses.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

 

I have tested this out by writing a userscript that uses Geonames to check which country is being viewed, then do a search biased to that country. If you're looking at England and search for "Birmingham", you get the one in the Midlands, but if you were looking at America, you get the one in Alabama. You can still search for a specific one (e.g. "Birmingham, AL" or "Birmingham England"), but this should give better first-time results more of the time. If the search can't find anything relevant in Geonames, it hands back to the normal search engine, so you can still type in zip/postal codes and other search terms.

 

I have also done some testing with Geonames and developed an experimental service for place name disambiguation. IMHO, the best approach is not to try to return a specific result given a search string. If the end user, provides enough information the algorithm will return an exact match, but rather than "guess" and return the most likely match when the amount of information is not specific, it should prompt for more information. It can do that using the geonames autosuggest API (that is what I did with my experimental service). For example, if I type in York, the service will pass what I have type so far to the service and return a list of about 20 possible candidates as a select list. I can then select the one that I want (i.e York, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa) and get back the lat/long coordinates for the location I want.

[jri]

Give it complete information and it works - give it guessable information and it guesses.

So why not give it a hint, and get a better guess?

 

I have tested this out by writing a userscript that uses Geonames to check which country is being viewed, then do a search biased to that country. If you're looking at England and search for "Birmingham", you get the one in the Midlands, but if you were looking at America, you get the one in Alabama. You can still search for a specific one (e.g. "Birmingham, AL" or "Birmingham England"), but this should give better first-time results more of the time. If the search can't find anything relevant in Geonames, it hands back to the normal search engine, so you can still type in zip/postal codes and other search terms.

 

I have also done some testing with Geonames and developed an experimental service for place name disambiguation. IMHO, the best approach is not to try to return a specific result given a search string. If the end user, provides enough information the algorithm will return an exact match, but rather than "guess" and return the most likely match when the amount of information is not specific, it should prompt for more information. It can do that using the geonames autosuggest API (that is what I did with my experimental service). For example, if I type in York, the service will pass what I have type so far to the service and return a list of about 20 possible candidates as a select list. I can then select the one that I want (i.e York, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa) and get back the lat/long coordinates for the location I want.

 

The two approaches are not incompatible. With an autosuggester, it still helps if you can sort the list of suggestions into a helpful order. Otherwise, if you're unlucky, you end up either having to scroll a long way through a list, or type the exact match anyway.

 

The list of results from the default Geonames search comes ordered by some sort of relevance function - I'm not sure of the exact algorithm, but it seems to prioritise on rank in the administrative hierarchy, then population size. Using the bias by country makes the local results come at the top of that list.

 

For my userscript I decided to use just the top hit for a couple of reasons: I wanted to minimise differences to the original interface, to minimise multiple network requests (i.e. not sending as you type, thinking of mobile users), and to retain the ability to fall back through to the original search engine rather than force a choice from the Geonames hits (so that you can still search by postal codes, coordinates and other strings that Geonames' database doesn't handle).

 

Another possibility (for either an autosuggester or a first-hit solution) would be to sort the results list by distance. I tried that, but I thought it threw up too many irrelevant results; Geonames sort order seemed to work much better.

 

Either way, there is a lot of potential to improve the current map search function.

[+Pink Paisley]

And it's at it again.

 

Frankfurt. I'm going to Frankfurt. And perversely, when I search for Frankfurt (even searching for 'Frankfurt, Germany'), in maps (reasonably expecting to find the German city pop nearly 700,000), GC maps chose to introduce me to a tiny settlement closer to Nuremburg than Frankfurt the city, consisting of about 3 dozen houses with one cache just beyond the village. I didn't even know there was more than one Frankfurt!

 

I do now.

 

PP.

[+Gitchee-Gummee]

And it's at it again.

 

Frankfurt. I'm going to Frankfurt. And perversely, when I search for Frankfurt (even searching for 'Frankfurt, Germany'), in maps (reasonably expecting to find the German city pop nearly 700,000), GC maps chose to introduce me to a tiny settlement closer to Nuremburg than Frankfurt the city, consisting of about 3 dozen houses with one cache just beyond the village. I didn't even know there was more than one Frankfurt!

 

I do now.

 

PP.

Selecting Frankfort, Hesse, Germany just may work a little better.

 

Adding the State/Region/Province can help a lot!

 

Dunno for sure, but it sure makes sense...

...to me, anyway.

Edited September 1, 2013 by Gitchee-Gummee

[+NYPaddleCacher]

And it's at it again.

 

Frankfurt. I'm going to Frankfurt. And perversely, when I search for Frankfurt (even searching for 'Frankfurt, Germany'), in maps (reasonably expecting to find the German city pop nearly 700,000), GC maps chose to introduce me to a tiny settlement closer to Nuremburg than Frankfurt the city, consisting of about 3 dozen houses with one cache just beyond the village. I didn't even know there was more than one Frankfurt!

 

I do now.

 

PP.

 

If you were going to Springfield, in the United States, you'd have to add the State in order to get the right Springfield. Searching for a city in another country isn't any different.

 

Searching by a location just uses a geocoding service that turns a feature name (i.e. a city/state/country) into a set of lat/long coordinates. There are several different geocoding services available (i.e. geonames) with APIs that allow sites like the geocaching.com site to send a location name and get back lat/long coordinates. The external geocoding service is basically just a database with a search mechanism, and like any search interface, the result you get are only as good as the search criteria.

 

 

[+hzoi]

And it's at it again.

 

Frankfurt. I'm going to Frankfurt. And perversely, when I search for Frankfurt (even searching for 'Frankfurt, Germany'), in maps (reasonably expecting to find the German city pop nearly 700,000), GC maps chose to introduce me to a tiny settlement closer to Nuremburg than Frankfurt the city, consisting of about 3 dozen houses with one cache just beyond the village. I didn't even know there was more than one Frankfurt!

 

I do now.

 

PP.

 

And you're at it again.

 

The city's name isn't Frankfurt, it's Frankfurt-am-Main.

 

You may have missed a valuable post above, here it is in bigger letters.

 

Give it complete information and it works - give it guessable information and it guesses.

[+Pink Paisley]

Thank you for the big letters. However, there were some big words which I had to look up in my big book of words.

 

And yes, I am at it again.

 

My point remains (and it isn't such a big deal other than a bit of a quirky discussion point and a though that Groundspeak might consider some user friendly features) that on a website that concerns itself largely with geocaching, geography and locations, it ignores my location and offers cacher unfriendly results. Yes, strictly speaking correct ones. But if I enter Frankfurt into Wikipedia for instance, it recognises that there is more than one Frankfurt (in fact, the main article heading is just plain 'Frankfurt', but it goes on to say 'Frankfurt am Main....commonly known as Frankfurt', so it would seem that I am not alone in my ignorance of there being more Frankfurts).

 

And to my eternal shame, I failed my geography exams at school. More than once as well, which may account for me not knowing the region of Germany, Frankfurt is in. There's still hope though, since I knew that Frankfurt IS in Germany.. And STILL like many people, including the airline AND the hotel chain that I have booked with, refer to the place as plain old 'Frankfurt'. Unless I have unwittingly booked to go to a tiny hamlet in Bavaria. Now there's a thought. Perhaps I should double check.

 

So when I enter 'Frankfurt' into the search box, wouldn't it be reasonable to offer choices to me? Perhaps ranked by distance from home? Or perhaps by density of caches because I may change my mind and go to a different Frankfurt. As mentioned previously in this thread, other sites manage to do it.

 

PP.

Edited September 3, 2013 by Pink Paisley

[+NYPaddleCacher]

Thank you for the big letters. However, there were some big words which I had to look up in my big book of words.

 

And yes, I am at it again.

 

My point remains (and it isn't such a big deal other than a bit of a quirky discussion point and a though that Groundspeak might consider some user friendly features) that on a website that concerns itself largely with geocaching, geography and locations, it ignores my location and offers cacher unfriendly results. Yes, strictly speaking correct ones. But if I enter Frankfurt into Wikipedia for instance, it recognises that there is more than one Frankfurt (in fact, the main article heading is just plain 'Frankfurt', but it goes on to say 'Frankfurt am Main....commonly known as Frankfurt', so it would seem that I am not alone in my ignorance of there being more Frankfurts).

 

And to my eternal shame, I failed my geography exams at school. More than once as well, which may account for me not knowing the region of Germany, Frankfurt is in. There's still hope though, since I knew that Frankfurt IS in Germany..

 

You're missing the point. Using my previous example, if you just entered "Springfield", the system can only guess which Springfield you want unless you provide more information.

 

So when I enter 'Frankfurt' into the search box, wouldn't it be reasonable to offer choices to me? Perhaps ranked by distance from home? Or perhaps by density of caches because I may change my mind and go to a different Frankfurt. As mentioned previously in this thread, other sites manage to do it.

PP.

 

It's entirely possible to offer choices, but the geocoding service that returns the lat/long coordinates doesn't know your home location and certainly doesn't know how many caches are in each location. Yes, other sites offer choices. In fact, I wrote a geonames client that uses auto-suggest to return a list of candidate matches as you type in a place name. When I enter Frankfurt I get the one in Hesse, Germany. I also get cities named Frankfurt in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, New York, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Kansas, South Dakota, and two other locations in Germany.