3 ms·

Good attempt, but some of these results are wonky. Right off the top of the list, the result for Allanburg is actually perfectly right - administratively it's

by jarek 14y ago

Good attempt, but some of these results are wonky. Right off the top of the list, the result for Allanburg is actually perfectly right - administratively it's part of Thorold hence why GeoNames came back with that. Dain City is maybe 500 m off the centre rather than outright wrong as suggested in the list. Ayr comes back as "8 George St, Kitchener ON N0B 1E0, Canada <+43.29177700,-80.45398100>" - the coordinates and the postal code are correct, the street and city name are not - I don't know how to rank the correctness of such a result. Same deal with nearby St. Jacobs. Port Robinson is also described incorrectly but has the correct coordinates. The answer for Burlington has first coordinates that are "close" (well within the city but not at centre/downtown/city hall), and the 'region' one is about 8 km off with a silly large error radius of 15 km. Ditto Kingston, Kitchener, and Markham. Similar deal with Clarington, Clarkson, Falconbridge, "Sudbury", and probably a bunch of others, though there's the added difficulty of Ontario municipal organization thrown in for those ones. Bizarrely, Ottawa's point result is perfect whereas the 'region' result is more than 20 km away with a specified radius of 55 km, but I'm not sure if that warrants a 'wrong' rating. Echo Bay points to the body of water rather than the settlement around it, and I don't think it's fair to expect the search to know you meant the settlement specifically. Jordan Station is marked "close" but is in fact 500 km off. Wilno is marked "close" but is 10 km of forest away. The results for Mississauga are unreasonably far away from the centre of the city but within the limits. Then there's search context - if you ask the service for "Baltimore Ontario" with no further context it might get it wrong, if you ask it from a device that knows it's at least in Ontario (or even New York or Michigan) it might work better. It would also be useful to somehow quantify the results by search likelihood, popularity, community size, etc. A few names I recognize from the missing or wrong list are fairly small settlements. Scrolling through the list (currently on W), the largest results I saw that were flat out wrong so far are Belleville, which is about 10 km off, North Bay about 8 km off, Whitchurch-Stouffville about 6 km off, and Burlington/Kingston/Kitchener/Markham/Mississauga 'region' issues as mentioned above.

cjensen 14y ago
Yep. Many of the place names in his "official" list do not have Wikipedia entries, which cast doubt in my mind on whether the places actually exist. I googled some and it seemed like Google doesn't think they exist either. Also, it looks like he counted a server error as a bad map result. Maybe the server was throttling him or the server is otherwise overloaded? A better attempt would be to use Wikipedia as a reference for places which (a) exist and (b) are non-trivial. Also he should cross reference against Google since that is the current standard in mapping.
- jarek 14y ago
  The server code 8 error appears to come up only for less significant placenames (I don't recognize vast majority of code 8 results), lending some credence to a theory that this error is returned for unrecognized queries. Edit: It has occurred to me the 'region' results might be trying to circumscribe the whole area of the municipality in a circle, which would certainly give odd results for a lot of Ontario municipalities.
tisme 14y ago
Trivia: ebay.com was named after Echo Bay, a Canadian consulting firm, which in turn was named after the township. Echobay.com was taken, the rest is history.
stan_rogers 14y ago
Falconbridge was always a bit fuzzy around the edges -- it was always hard to tell when you'd strayed into Garson or New Sudbury (it was easier to tell when you'd left Gatchell behind and hit the West End) and there weren't too many people upset when Nickel Centre happened in the First Great Amalgamation. (The people of Copper Cliff--which was swallowed by the City--and most of what became Walden were somewhat less happy.) I haven't been back there for many years, but as I understand it, "Sudbury" can now be better defined by naming the few Northern Ontario municipalities it doesn't yet include. If the X marking the spot is not in Timmins, Espanola/Nairn, Mattawa or the Sound, but somewhere in between those points, it's probably "in Sudbury", on paper at least. (For you foreigners, that territory includes a moderately-sized urban/commercial/industrial centre, several small hard-rock mining towns, some of the best farmland in Canada, forestry, quarrying, a small inland fishery ... you know, the sort of mixture that's obviously best administered by calling the whole thing one big happy municipality.)

by jarek 14y ago

cjensen 14y ago

Yep. Many of the place names in his "official" list do not have Wikipedia entries, which cast doubt in my mind on whether the places actually exist. I googled some and it seemed like Google doesn't think they exist either. Also, it looks like he counted a server error as a bad map result. Maybe the server was throttling him or the server is otherwise overloaded? A better attempt would be to use Wikipedia as a reference for places which (a) exist and (b) are non-trivial. Also he should cross reference against Google since that is the current standard in mapping.

jarek 14y ago
The server code 8 error appears to come up only for less significant placenames (I don't recognize vast majority of code 8 results), lending some credence to a theory that this error is returned for unrecognized queries. Edit: It has occurred to me the 'region' results might be trying to circumscribe the whole area of the municipality in a circle, which would certainly give odd results for a lot of Ontario municipalities.

tisme 14y ago

Trivia: ebay.com was named after Echo Bay, a Canadian consulting firm, which in turn was named after the township. Echobay.com was taken, the rest is history.

stan_rogers 14y ago

Falconbridge was always a bit fuzzy around the edges -- it was always hard to tell when you'd strayed into Garson or New Sudbury (it was easier to tell when you'd left Gatchell behind and hit the West End) and there weren't too many people upset when Nickel Centre happened in the First Great Amalgamation. (The people of Copper Cliff--which was swallowed by the City--and most of what became Walden were somewhat less happy.) I haven't been back there for many years, but as I understand it, "Sudbury" can now be better defined by naming the few Northern Ontario municipalities it doesn't yet include. If the X marking the spot is not in Timmins, Espanola/Nairn, Mattawa or the Sound, but somewhere in between those points, it's probably "in Sudbury", on paper at least. (For you foreigners, that territory includes a moderately-sized urban/commercial/industrial centre, several small hard-rock mining towns, some of the best farmland in Canada, forestry, quarrying, a small inland fishery ... you know, the sort of mixture that's obviously best administered by calling the whole thing one big happy municipality.)