That would be cool. Or like a radius from a single coordinate point. You can of course move and zoom the map to anywhere you would like it, and then “Redo search in map” to get a bounding box, but that only allows you to make rectangles of a certain aspect ratio.
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This is possible by manually editing the URL.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-use-inaturalists-search-urls-wiki/63#heading--bounding--area
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Oh, thank you. That was set to my local municipality, Loon op Zand. Which makes sense, now that I think about it, as it always starts there. I don’t really want it to, so I just changed it. I just checked, and it doesn’t look like that was related, as the website behavior I described is still the same.
Thanks for the above comments, cmcheatle and thomaseverest, those are very helpful and interesting! Neat.
There are 2 possibilities I can think of.
For me at least, when I enter Netherlands into the search, it initially displays the same box that you see, but then quickly changes to the proper map as the ‘translation’ is done. It is possible something is blocking that refresh on your system
Also Google search results vary depending on where they are submiited from, so the ‘Netherlands’ in my search results may actually be pointing to something different in Google Maps than your search results.
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Yes, I saw your comments under one set of them, but couldn’t open others, so if you added comments there too, just mark all duplicates, in cases of pics with more species seen iding one of them (also with comment) is possible too.
Oh, interesting. Sometimes I have these sorts of issues with Google Chrome, and I am also using an adblocker on my browser, so it might be related to this. Let me try it now with Edge… yes, how about that! It goes right to the actual borders of the country. (Did not see the bounding box first, but it might just be too fast for that.)
Now let me try again in Chrome with my adblocker disabled. Nope, same behavior. So it’s probably related to Chrome, the browser, then. Thank you! Also, I cannot seem to post any more comments for today (first day being active on the forum), nor hit the enter key when editing this message, so I’ll have to reply further in here for now. Yes, my Chrome is also set to English. In response to two messages down: That is very interesting. It sounds like it might be the case when set to French, right? It might have “Pays-bas” or something. I ask because I am learning French and if I visit Google, the website shows up in French (even though Chrome and my OS themselves are set to English).
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Is your Chrome set to English?
I suspect the problem is the same as the one here. In short, something is telling the Google Maps API to return the results in Dutch. I know the OS can do this, as can the browser. In this case, I’m not sure where the message is coming from, but you can verify whether that’s the problem using Chrome’s Developer Tools.
Once you select Netherlands in the Location drop-down, there will be a call to the Google API. If it’s being told to return a result in Dutch, there will be “nl” in the call. Here’s mine when I set the browser to Dutch:
Then, the result comes back with “Nederland” instead of “Netherlands”:
iNat then tries to find a place called “Nederland” and fails (because the iNat place is called “Netherlands”), so it uses the bounding box coordinates instead.
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Google’s entire localization is messed up. It simply can’t decide if I am English or Danish. Some services assume English, while other seemingly random ones assume I am Danish and act accordingly.
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Exactly! If Google is showing up in French, I would bet that iNat is getting French results, which will also give the bounding box.
I also changed your trust level, so I think you should be able to post again.
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That sounds frustrating. There are just so many places to set the language – OS, browser, Google account, iNat – and even just in testing, I continue to be surprised about which ones override which other ones.
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Not a big deal, I’m fluent in both, just surprising it is so inconsistent.
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That must be it, then. In fact, let me try it right now. Huh. So my google.com UI was all in French, but my settings page was all in English, and I did not find a language setting there. On the main page, I could switch it to English, and it seems to remember that between visits to google.com, but it doesn’t seem like that fixes the issue on iNaturalist.
Exactly this.
Thank you, that’s very helpful :)
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