GreenInfo-Network / caliparks.org

Mapping social media in parks and other open spaces
http://www.caliparks.org/
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Improve park name search #482

Closed danrademacher closed 8 years ago

danrademacher commented 9 years ago

Searching for a park name works only for major parks like Mount Diablo, the Presidio, etc. Other parks, like Chicken Ranch State Beach (http://www.caliparks.org/park/17190) are very difficult to find on the site.

Google's geocoding service doesn't recognize the place name (thought straight googling the term produces a map with a marker at the right spot!), and then our method of weighting parks by activity count also gets in the way. This park has no activities, so even if we found the park as the center of our geo-search, it would be crowded out of the results by other parks about which we have more data.

Steps to resolving this issue:

danrademacher commented 9 years ago

I pulled analytics for the first 8 weeks, and out of 3145 unique search strings, I could identify 325 as being attempts to search by park name. Of those, relatively few were exact searches -- most were partial, so getting a park name search that works for most people won't be easy. But it obviously seems like a search for an exact park name should work. We just have to be careful about causing trouble for the much more common location searches in the process.

Compare that to 1,110 ZIP or LatLng searches (presumably the latter are mostly from mobile), and about 890 city searches. And then a 500 strings I wasn't going to try to classify right now. (See data here).