Comment by maelito | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maelito | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks a lot for your report !

The shaking is probably caused by an aggressive option in Firefox : see this issue https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2095.

We can't really act on this, it appears to break a lot of websites :/ Maybe we should try to auto-detect it and show a dialog to the user.

> for below, all have "here" selected (not "everywhere") and this same view: https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962

Thanks, it lets me understand the bugs that make coffees impossible to be found for you. The first problem is that for performance reasons, we don't enable category discovery and search at high zoom. They only appear at zoom 13 (https://cartes.app/#13.7/43.04398/-87.911), and your link was at zoom 12.41. This category suggestion would have let you show all coffee places on the map. But not yet filter your searches to this category only, that will be a game-changer feature we're working on.

The zoom limitation is a known problem, but probably worse in the US where cities are less dense than in Europe. I'll prioritize it, thanks.

2nd problem is that the "coffee" word doesn't trigger the coffee category. It should, I'll investigate too.

On your link, two Valentine coffee are shown on the map with the query "valentine", but none are in the search results list, and they're on the edges of the map. Interesting bug : probably a side effect of adding address search last week, I'll investigate.

You're probably our first US-user test, thanks again :)

I do have resist-fingerprinting on, thanks! I'll have to poke at that, I'm curious about the technical reasons. A dialog would help, this is the first I've heard of it and I don't mind exceptions for sites that aren't injecting javascript on billions of unrelated pages.

>and they're on the edges of the map

I don't think they were very edge-y from what I remember... but I'll double check. And will get a screenshot if I disagree - maybe it's something about window size or display density.

>we don't enable category discovery and search at high zoom.

Yeah, I've seen that in a few apps. It's kinda fine when zoomed far out as it's not like you'd be getting a representative distribution, and it might flood more specific (and intended) results out. It broadly makes sense, though I mostly see people confused and frustrated by it in-person (there's rarely any way to tell it has happened). Some of that is just them being overly familiar with only Google though.

But if that category search is not enabled, why doesn't it find business name matches? And why are the results far outside the viewing window?

Also I think that zoom level is almost certainly worth allowing (not necessarily defaulting to) category search. In a dense city it'll overwhelm things, but in much of the USA that might find 2-3 things, if any at all. Maybe it's worth blending in the number of results you'd get if it was enabled when deciding? Like "<10, use category". Or do you also do that?

Prioritisation on search behaviors is super hard, I definitely understand that... but that's why user-controlled options are useful. OSM apps nigh-universally seem to be removing that as the years go by, and the end result is that it's almost unusable because it doesn't let you find things you know exist. Google mitigates it with enormous amounts of ad money and hundreds/thousands of engineers feeding recommendation systems to show 10 decent results out of 100,000 matches (and a lot of learned helplessness by their users), but I don't think that's worth emulating, and they still have a ton of optional controls for filtering. OSM data is convoluted and messy and hard to make convenient, but not having any control at all seems obviously worse to me. Even a `raw-field-name:"value"` seems better, it's passively learnable and fairly easy when tokenized.

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Lest this all seem like ranting / an upset user: I just have lots of opinions about mapping! And I'm broadly rather unhappy with existing apps. I'm literally always glad to see new attempts, and I don't expect everything to be built for me, so thank you for trying things :) I'm entirely happy to say a ton more or just not be your target audience and stick to technical stuff.

> I don't think they were very edge-y from what I remember... but I'll double check. And will get a screenshot if I disagree - maybe it's something about window size or display density.

For some reasons, the results drawn on the map are more numerous than the ones we show in the result list. I've raised an issue to investigate this. https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2480

> But if that category search is not enabled, why doesn't it find business name matches? And why are the results far outside the viewing window?

Good question. It's a Photon (our search API) problem as far as I know. We probably did set a local search ponderation too low for this use case.

In case the user chose the (default) "search here" option, we could also add a proximity ranking.

I do agree with your last big paragraph : we don't have Google's budget, hence the "search here" option which already solved lots of dead ends. Thanks a lot for this discussion !

Does it just use "here" / viewing box as a bias, not a hard cutoff? Personally I definitely expect "here" to mean "absolutely no results outside my window under any circumstances" (with some room for fuzziness with different screen aspect ratios, though even then I expect fewer results, not more). I'm not familiar with what Photon does tho, and it's not particularly clear from a quick skim of the site/readme.

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