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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

1. You were searching for an airport, left out the word "airport", which is the most important word, and it's Apple's fault?

2. I just went into Maps and searched for "San Francisco International". There were two hits, and the second hit was the airport. The other hit was for a business in SF with "International" as the first word in its name. These do not seem like completely awful search results to me.

3. Why are you assuming (and yes, it's a complete assumption which is free of evidence) that "Apple partisans want to believe" (you can read minds now too?) that it's only a data problem? I'm an Apple partisan, and I worked on the Maps team, specifically on quality of search results. I can tell you that what I believe is that it is both a problem of needing to refine the database, and also a problem of needing to continue to improve the search capability. Does this change your assumptions?

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  > 1. You were searching for an airport, left out the word
  > "airport", which is the most important word, and it's
  > Apple's fault?

Yes, it is Apple's fault, in a sense, because the customer is always right. Moreover, a competitor (Google) is able to connect the dots and return the right results. I just searched that same phrase on Android and it gave me directions to the airport in question, along with a phone number and other useful information.

Whether it is able achieve that feat because it knows that I have been to SFO within the last month, or knows that I have emails in my inbox that pertain to the airport, or because more users click through to SFO than other hits for that search phrase or because they use black magic is beside the point: Google's search results are simply better.

Why not just search for "sfo" or "airport", both of which return the airport correctly on iOS 6's maps? Typing out "san francisco international" and leaving out "airport" seems incredibly contrived.

No, it isn't.

When most people refer to a place, they refer to it by it's common name. You fly to JFK, Heathrow, Charles de Gaule, Gatwick, Luton, O'Hare, etc. There is no need to add "airport" to something which so obviously is one in the context.

The familiarity of common names is why wikipedia uses them for article names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_titles#Common...

You're missing something obvious, which is that out of all the airports you listed, NONE of them is named after the city it's in or near.

SFO, of course, is. Which makes this particular search MUCH more ambiguous unless you include the word "airport".

Why should I have to? Google knows exactly what I'm asking for when I enter any of those terms, Apple does not. That is a deficiency on Apple's part, I shouldn't have to change my behaviour.

The answer to the problem of not coming up with the right answer for a perfectly reasonable query is 'Change your query'?

Apple apologists are actually making Apple lazy and entitled. Any sub standard stuff needs to be pointed out. Not hand-waved away.

1. I can't make you see the problem if you don't want to see it. The phrase "San Francisco International" is conversationally unambiguous.

2. I'm no longer in the area, but at the time I made the search I got something like 5-10 results, none of which was clearly the airport.

3. That's my explanation for why nobody is talking about what I feel is the giant elephant sitting in the corner. Maybe I'm wrong. If Apple partisans actually think that the search is fine, that might be a better explanation.

Imagine how much better Google results would be if, instead of returning what you wanted, they told you off for not typing an easier to find query.

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