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Comment by wcarss | Hacker News Reader

Just to report that it isn't necessarily/solely cultural myopia at work here: I live in Ontario and have family in London, Ontario, and while visiting them with location services on have both asked for and googled "what is the temperature in London, Ontario" (notice that I said the region!), and gotten results for London England. I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times.

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Sometimes these systems just make baffling decisions. One time years ago, while waiting for my plane to begin deboarding at JFK Airport in NYC, I tried setting my MacBook's timezone to Eastern manually. I started typing "New Y" into the Closest City field. OS X helpfully auto-completed it as "New Yekeba, Liberia": https://evan.tumblr.com/image/65341168142

As best I can tell, New Yekeba is a tiny resettled former mining town with minimal population. There are very few English-language web pages about it. Somehow this ranked higher for Apple's auto-suggest than the most populous city in the US.

"e" is alphabetically before "o" ?

Looks like the autocomplete is going off alphabetical order rather than some other characteristic of the city?

I considered that, but in that case it would have suggested New Yarmouth (among other places) first.

I guess that's the next innovation. In the old days, you enter the entire search string. Then you got Google Suggest where each keystroke was trapped and responded to. Now not only you need to trap each keystroke, you need a weighted list of results so you show them in the order of popularity.

Not an Edit: I am pretty sure Google is already doing it so it is not an innovation, its been there for a while. I am calling it so for the folks who are not doing it. Also, it may be there in general search but it may have seemed like excessive data for searching time zones on your phone. But with billions of phone users, such usage would be common and the feature will happen, eventually.

Weighting results in Search Autocomplete is something Google has done since launching it.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, though not on this)

Hey, it's correct when sorted alphabetically! Good enough, commit and ship it!

>I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times.

That's not going to get you anywhere - they're not listening.

On the bright side, screaming at the void can be therapeutic for some people...

The modern day equivalent of writing a stern letter and just leaving it in a drawer.

You could send it to The Times and see if it goes to the London version? ;)

There is an entire new class of species breeding over there: "Artificial Humans" [1]: A quantum state thing that may or may not be a real human. You can never tell. This is beyond Turing test. A real human behaving as bot or vice versa.

[1]. https://trialx.com/blog/google-play-bans-our-covid-app-built...

It's not true. But reports are very valuable when filed with helpful information.

Simply use the airport code YXU ;)

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