Searching for a city only gives a city park (Austin, TX, USA)

Platform - Website
Browser, if a website issue - I tried Firefox, Edge, and Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
Observations · iNaturalist

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: Go to the Explore Page

Step 2: In the location box, type Austin TX and choose Austin, TX, USA from the pulldown menu.

Step 3: Click Go

The resulting search limits the search area to the boundaries of the Austin Nature and Science Center instead of the whole city of Austin. So it only searches a small park within the much larger city.

This isn’t really a bug, the site accesses location information from 2 sources, 1 being Google maps, the other internally stored in the iNat database.

The search bar on the explore page at te top uses the Google Maps search. iNat has no control over how things are named there.

A better choice is to click filters, expand the more filters and use the location search there to access the internally stored iNat ones (note there is no guarantee any particular place is stored internally in the iNat database. Nations, provinces/states, counties etc will likely be, cities may not)

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The easiest thing to do is to zoom to austin or search for austin then unclick the search parameter at the top so that it goes to “The World”. Then click places of interest and since you are looking at the area, one of the choices should be “City of Austin”. You can also choose by county or region that way as well.

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this has been discussed in other threads. a moderator might want to combine this with one of the others at some point:

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