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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

> For example, try a query such as "coffee shops" and zoom in on the map to refine your search.

There is exactly one result for "coffee shops" in San Francisco. The tech and privacy initiatives sound good, but unfortunately the data needs work to pass basic sanity checks.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shops&ia=web&iaxm=maps&stri...

Edit:

Searching for "coffee shop" (singular) shows many more results. Perhaps the blog post should use that as its example.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shop&ia=web&iaxm=maps&stric...

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Now imagine how bad it is outside of the SF bubble. I searched for coffee shops and the closest result to me is 7 hours drive away.

Coffee shops gets me 3 results in my city, coffee shop gets me 4 results with the closest 45 miles away. Totally useless.

I don't really understand how it's this bad when OSM data alone can get you much better results.

There are only two coffee shops in Wellington (NZ) according to DDG/AppleMaps.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shop&t=h_&ia=recipes&iaxm=m...

Edit: searching for "cafe" gives better results but still not great

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cafe&t=h_&ia=recipes&iaxm=places&s...

I just tried "coffee shop" and "coffee shops" near my location in eastern Pennsylvania (semi-rural) and the results are atrocious. "Supermarket" shows all the possible options so it's not all bad.

It's a fun example, imagine how garbage search in languages that have more than one case is is. :/

"coffee shop" on the other hand yields 20 results. I agree that some support for fuzzy search is needed, but there is a reasonable amount of data there.

I hate when searches parse like that. Ideally coffee shop, coffee shops, coffee, cafe, espresso, etc. should all give me the same exact results: 100% of the stores in the area that sell coffee.

I don't think there's a single piece of mapping software that doesn't suck hard in some way. It's pretty annoying how google maps shows you x number of results zoomed out, y zoomed in, and z with the map frame moved half a block to the left.

Just show me everything. Search the entire city. Flood my map. Let me do the vetting, that's what I came to maps to do anyway.

where the sets of y and z might not even overlap

This shows that they are probably not even doing stemming which shouldn't be that hard to implement and could have great benefit/cost

Weirdly, "coffee shops in san francisco" shows a lot.

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