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Comment by Meph504 | Hacker News Reader

I generally find propublica makes really interesting lookups with the worse method for searching, why would you not offer zip code search, or by state. Instead I have to know the city name or the P-code.

Just always feels like a missed opportunity to provide actual meaningful data.

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As others have said, it does not really make sense to search by ZIP code for most consumers. Your chicken could come from anywhere. This is meant to check the processor for a specific package of chicken.

The site is specifically by p-code, company, or processor location.

But only by single location, I'm not sure if you've been near a chicken processing plant, but they are very often clustered together, shockingly near where an abundance of commercial chicken farms are, so knowing the percentage chance by an area can be very useful.

I don't think my perspective and interest seem to be aligning with most people commenting here.

I'm not concerned about if a random package of chicken is OK, I'm concerned about a cluster of processors.

It sort of makes sense though. The data is available at a plant level, but you can't necessarily tie a particular zip code to a particular processing plant, since supply chain/availability changes.

Distributors ship products far away from their sources, sometimes to other states. I think a zip code lookup tool would not be useful and may even mislead.

The tool does look up facilities and containation by address or p-code, my intent is to be able to do the same lookup by the zip of the address and report the same information as presented.

I'm not sure what you are considering, but I can't see how if I can look it up by full address, being able to lookup multiple by zip would change the representation of data, or change its usefulness?

Except you can search by state?

Just type in the state abbreviation.

Have you tried this, as it seeming does not work at All. Type in LA you get a single facility in Delaware

Did you find a plant in Louisiana that's not showing up?

The search box lets you search any part of the address. You need to use proper abbreviations for example, but I don't see how you wouldn't be able to find a plant by state.

If by proper abbreviation for Louisiana you mean ", La." then yes, you get a list you can choose from, then you can select each one individually. But because they did not choose include zips in their address if you want to cluster them you can do it by city, then figure out which cities are nearest to each other.

Just seems this could have been done a lot better, with very little effort.

Not "very little effort" in the slightest. It's an entirely different concept than a simple textual search they have now.

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