Search results in the United States should display State rather than County
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Dear Windy Development Team,
When searching for locations within the United States, Windy shows the location name, county name, and the country. For example:
Twin Peaks - Iron County - United States
As has been stated a number of times before this post, I don't know of a single person who knows county names (beyond perhaps a few close to where they live). Everybody in the United States, however, does know state names.
A quick Google search states that there are more than 3000 counties in the United States. So really, no average person would know more than just the few closest counties.
When I search for Twin Peaks, Windy yields the following:
- Twin Peaks - San Bernadino County, United States
- Twin Peaks - Salt Lake County, United States
- Twin Peaks - Sandoval Country, United States
- Twin Peaks - Iron County, United States
Because I don't know county names, I am forced to do a google search for each county in the four results to figure out which State the particular Twin Peaks resides in. If Windy listed the State rather than the County, then I wouldn't have to perform those four extra searches.
To compound matters even more, if you look at Twin Peaks in Iron County, my google search yields three possible states that have an Iron County. Those include Utah, Wisconsin and Michigan. So Windy's results for that particular Twin Peak is ambiguous.
I would like to ask Windy (for U.S. locations) to please either replace the county name with the state name, or to add the state name. In my opinion, helpful results could be formatted in one of the following possibilities:
- Twin Peaks - Utah - United States
or alternatively
- Twin Peaks - Utah - Iron Country - United States
Thank you.
Roger Nedel
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@rnedel Hello, thank you for suggestion.
Our map provider is OpenStreetMap.org, therefore if you would like to change something on the map, I would recommend to contact them directly, since we have no control over the map names or borders.Korina
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I think US users would like something like on Mapy.cz - which as you know uses same base map data source as Windy.com - where searching for "Palmira" returns (at least for US) expected results as:
- [Municipality/Town] + State + Country
- Village + County + State + Country
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Korina
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I understand that they are your map provider. I will offer that suggestion to them. Since you are their direct customer, however, I suspect a request from you might be more persuasive. That is, of course, if you agree the suggestion has merit. Thank you.
Roger
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Thank you again. I just responded to your earlier response. I now see this one in which you commit to looking at it for future releases. I appreciate your willingness to seek a solution.
Roger
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Yes. Mapy.cz provides a solid template for what might work well to disambiguate search results. Thank you for adding value to this request.
Roger
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Actually admin entities in OpenStreetMap data do contain all required admin levels, while different geocoding engines may return all or part of them to geocoding queries.
E.g. OpenStreetMap site returns expected admin levels (here, same search as above for "Palmyra" on US map coverage), when using Nominatim geocoding engine:
