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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

Worse is when you're looking for something local but it decides there's a great match halfway around the world and zooms you all the way there.

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I'm amazed at how long this particular behavior has persisted...how often does someone search for a local business 5000+ miles away without being explicit about it (ie moving the map to that far off area, or putting it in the search query itself).

Agreed, the amount of times it defaults to finding something a thousand miles away is significantly more infuriating than the rarer case when I want to specifically do that.

If its a fairly fresh app launch, default to around me

Every time I try to search for Asian, I get sent to Asia while my location is in the US. I have no idea how anyone would find that sort of "typo" correction and redirection halfway around the world useful.

Kids using Maps as a globe would find that useful. Why not search for "Asian food"?

Hmm which use case is more common...kids usings Maps as a globe, or people looking for Asian food?

1. I'm perfectly fine with "Asia" redirecting me to the continent, which is generally expected behavior. I don't understand why a word that clearly means something distinct needs to redirect there as well.

2. The lack of consistency is especially annoying. "Italian" redirects to Italian restaurants in my area, and the same goes for "Chinese", etc.

Where do you land when searching for "Italy" or "China"? I wouldn't call this "lack of consistency".

I was in NYC 2 weeks ago (live in Miami). If I search for "Walgreens" the first 2 autocomplete suggestions are still locations in Brooklyn, and the third is the general text search for "walgreens". Options 4, 5 and etc onwards are local stores, but also not sorted by distance.

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