In the Location field on the right-hand side of the Explore page, if you select “Deer Park TX USA,” the search results are limited to the Land Feature “Deer Park Prairie,” which is a small, specific area within the city. Desktop site Windows 10 Vivaldi browser [Edited to make it clear which part…

[image] rupertclayton: It appears that if you enter a place name isn’t an exact match, it seems that iNat will choose whatever appears to be the best text match, which often will be one of those poorly defined custom places. I think this is behind the mismatches to Deer Park Prairie, Vancouver C…

[image] teellbee: An exact match for Los Gatos, CA would be Los Gatos, CA, not Los Gatos Creek County Park. But (as far as I can tell) iNat does not have a place for Los Gatos, CA, so that match is not possible. [Screenshot 2023-07-25 at 9.18.43 AM] [Screenshot 2023-07-25 at 9.19.13 AM] A…

I’ve been frustrated by that search bar in the past for this exact reason. You’d think selecting an option from the dropdown would provide that exact option, not skip down to some other option. (I also tried selecting Los Gatos, CA from the dropdown and got the Creek County Park instead.) There ar…

I assume they’re seeing this: [image] If iNaturalist doesn’t have a place for Los Gatos, CA, and isn’t pulling one from Google but is instead defaulting to another place, why is that item showing up in the drop-down? That seems like a bug, too - either a technical bug or a design bug. Drop-down …

Thanks, Rupert, but I was talking about the Location field on the right-hand side of the Explore page, not in the Identify dialog or at the top of the Explore page. I’ve edited my original post to make this clearer. It may be that this Location field and the one in the Identify dialog use the same …

I agree that this is frustrating. It seems that the functionality in the search bar and dialogs should heavily prioritize standard, expected places (countries, states/provinces, counties, major parks/protected areas, major cities). The ability to add custom places is useful from a community perspec…

There’s even a Place for Vancouver, BC - two, depending on whether you mean the municipality or the metro area - and both are returned higher in the place search results than Vancouver Marine Waters (not that returning Vancouver Island would be great either, admittedly). Agreed, the prioritization w…

I definitely agree it could be improved, but the current system is supposed to help you get to the general area of your search, because there’s no way iNat can have as many places as Google does. You can then use any of these tools to search in your area of interest, or at least an approximation of …

Again, everywhere but on the right-and side of the Explore page, the Location dropdown works as expected, in that it only shows options which, if clicked on, correspond to the results. By contrast, the location dropdown on the right-hand side of the Explore page shows options which, if clicked on, d…

Searching for observations in a city returns observations for a specific land feature within the city

General

tiwane July 25, 2023, 4:30pm 11

(moved this to General as it doesn’t seem like a bug)

Topic		Replies	Views
Countries become rectangular when using the Location bar in Explore General	34	2332	April 21, 2021
Search engine with problems with word brazil Bug Reports	35	1694	November 10, 2025
Trying to search for Place "Savannah, Georgia", comes up with Place, "Savannah National Wildlife Refuge" General	9	755	March 2, 2023
Searching for a city only gives a city park (Austin, TX, USA) Bug Reports	3	426	June 17, 2021
Places / Selecting "China" ends up in HK General	20	1409	December 2, 2020

Searching for observations in a city returns observations for a specific land feature within the city

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