Selecting Punjab, India is showing Punjab, Pakistan in explore tab

[kabirswaraich]

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome and Firefox

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices:

/):

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 https://www.inaturalist.org/home

Step 2: click on explore

Step 3: it will open http://inaturalist.org/observations. Now go to location box and type in punjab and wait.

Step 4: It will show 2 options on the top Punjab, India and below it Punjab, Pakistan.

Step 5: Selecting Punjab, India ends up going to Punjab, Pakistan. ???

[jwidness]

The Location search is powered by Google and sometimes doesn’t give the expected results. If you instead use the Place search by going to Filters -> More Filters, you will correctly get Punjab in India when you select “Punjab, IN”.

In this particular case, I’m not sure if the error is entirely Google’s or if iNat is incorrectly handling information that Google is passing. From maps.google.com, clicking on “Punjab India” correctly gives the place in India.

[bug_girl]

Welcome to the forum!

[ram_k]

Hello

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Webiste

Browser : Firefox

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
This is the search for Punjab, INDIA which ends up showing Punjab, Pakistan

This is the actual location - Punjab, India

Screenshots of what you are seeing
Search for Punjab, India shows this

While it should actually show the below

Description of problem
Using the explore option and then searching for Punjab, India results in it showing a different Punjab

Step 1: Open the Explore Option

Step 2: Type Punjab (and Select Punjab, India from the autofill)

Step 3: Shows results for Punjab, Pakistan

This search seemed to work earlier but is not working now

Thanks
FYI

[jwidness]

(I moved your report to this existing topic)

I looked a little closer at the issue, and it’s definitely iNat’s fault, not Google. Google returns the correct bounding box and iNat looks for places near that bounding box, but for some reason*, iNat uses 0,0 as a reference location, and Punjab, Pakistan is closer to 0,0 than Punjab, India. It’s the same issue reported for Niger/Nigeria here.

Edit: I shouldn’t have said “for some reason” – there is a real reason. When you first load the Explore page, 0,0 is used as the default reference location because it doesn’t know what else to use. And if you manually zoom to Punjab, India and then enter it in the search box, it will use the zoomed coordinates instead of 0,0 and get the correct boundary. But I think it kind of defeats the purpose if you have to manually move to the correct location in order to get the correct boundary.

[ram_k]

wow, this is a great explanation.

I always wondered why inaturalist reverted to default 0.0 despite knowing where the device is located.

I actually got lucky when searching for Punjab, India for some statistics and somehow arrived at the correct location (ppossible was using the filter option). Only the second time around from the main search location tool.it went to Punjab , Pakistan

[jwidness]

This was fixed, so I’m going to mark it solved.