Linking of Google locations and iNat places

General
1

Under what circumstances should the Location search find an iNaturalist place rather than a google place?

2

I find that that it usually works for countries, states, and counties (at least in the US). But using Places is a better method. Even better (to me) is using the header search, which searches iNat places. Click on “View Observations” for a place and it will show you the Explore page results for that place.

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I think what @zabdiel may be getting at is the ongoing confusion between Google Locations and iNat Places when both are offered in searches.

Ideally I would love to see Google Locations go away entirely, and be completely covered by iNat Places instead. But imagining that is unlikely to happen, and Google Locations are

I wonder if it would make sense to have any search on Google Locations first look at iNat Places of the same name, and use them preferentially when found. In other words, design the searches to make Google Locations truly a last resort when no appropriate iNat Place is available?

6 Likes
4

Yes, clearly the location search does find the iNaturalist place in some circumstances. I’m presuming there must be some logic to it and it might be useful to know what that logic is. I now know about the difference so can work round it but many people won’t know about it.

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I’m battling with this. It is usual on a website, if a searchbox is offered there - that it is to search within that website.
If want to go outside iNat to search Google for something, I will do that.

I truly battle with - so at least if you search with Location you will get something

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I can see the argument for it if there are lots of places missing on iNaturalist. If I search for the national park near my city it includes observations from my city which seems weird (especially as it does exist as a place). It’s also possible that only searching iNat places would encourage people to add places.

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7

Then, for myself I would prefer a workflow like this.

  1. Search within iNat for my place
  2. A popup this place is not yet on iNat, do you want to add it? With a - do not show me this again - as needed.
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8

some of the Google locations also have wrong uncertainty buffers that are way too small.

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