Suggestions for synonyms override options with the name typed

Not quite sure how to explain this, hopefully the screenshot will help. When you type Habenaria into the “Suggest an ID” bar, all of the results shown are actually Platanthera species (I suspect this happens with other taxa as well). While I like having synonyms listed in a search, it seems like it would be best to have some way of prioritizing taxa that actually match the input given. This might fit better in the feature requests section, but I couldn’t decide, let me know if I should change it.

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I do see the right genus first, but if you add a space after if, it only shows former Habenaria spp. because they’re all more commonly observed than Habenaria spp.

with space:

This related bug report was recently closed: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/wrong-order-of-id-suggestions-synonyms-are-shown-before-accepted-taxon/18648/6

I’m not sure what exactly the feature request would be, or how the current ranking is done, but ranking priorities like this would make sense to me:

  1. accepted scientific name & common names that match my account settings
  2. synonyms
  3. common names that don’t match my account settings

plus some sort of weighting based on number of observations, but not at the expense of any queries exactly matching the accepted scientific name not appearing in the results.

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I believe this is working as designed (i.e. more frequently observed taxa appear higher in the list). A feature request to deprioritize synonyms over accepted names was recently submitted, so I’ll close this report and let’s focus the discussion there: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/prioritize-scientific-name-over-synonym-in-display-order-of-species-search/23191

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