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There's a massive difference to printing 10 distances from your result set, and calculating 10 million.Well, no reason to calculate 10 million. If another way to select a list of top suggestions to show is less costly, you can just calculate the distance for the existing suggestions they're already about to show - and then show them sorted by the distance).
Having the unknown criteria they used to pick the suggestions reflected in the order they show them is not useful to anyone though.
>I'm not sure why you had to exaggerate "millennia".
Not exaggerating -- pointing to the fact that we know techniques to do it, and we have been doing it (obviously manually before computers) for millennia.
>How does a computer know that searching "Wawa" means you want the store and not the town? You haven't even considered that.
I did, and I mention it in 2 places in my response above: they could either sort all by distance and display what each entry is next to it (e.g. town, store, etc), or give sorted lists for different types of results (e.g. locations vs businesses).
>And a really good system would clearly takes a load of things you're not considering into account, relevance, rank, personal relevance, historical relevance age, etc.
Whatever the above system "took into account" it failed. And it's a case that's common to 99% of the population (search for a business). Searching for a location is another 99% common case.
Historical relevance and age? Who cares besides tourists (and even them, when they're not searching for a location or a business but for sightseeing)? A system should have sane defaults and hide those other things under user enabled search/sort criteria.