Technical difficulties?

I agree with Pam, for if you bring in a Dutch city, this cityname is also in the field for the province. A BIG MISTAKE and I can not understand how that is related to google-search. It is realy anoying now, for everytime you have to go in to the placename if you want it good done. Is there not a better solution, for it makes users crazy.....

Bjorn is correct. I always use the edit location fields.

Ditto here - I Only use - the Expanded fields - many times adding 1-2 other language spelling in brackets from Wikipedia ie: city = Łódź (Lodz, Lodsch) as well as: county, region, country

jMu said: "if you bring in a Dutch city, this cityname is also in the field for the province. A BIG MISTAKE and I can not understand how that is related to google-search"

Seems jMu is right that this is a Geni feature rather than a Google feature. Geni.com think the repeated city name is a desirable feature that they are trying to implement wherever they can.

See http://help.geni.com/entries/21140691-error-in-city-name

In the case of Lodz by the way, you get it three times as Pam said: Łódź, Łódź, Łódź Voivodeship, Poland

Thank you all for the explanation and helpful suggestions.

Private User, Pam Karp, and Private User. Just to clarify - we are not trying to fill in duplicated information wherever we can. In the Lodz, Poland example, Google is telling us that the city of Łódź is located in a county (or Polish equivalent) named Łódź, which in turn is inside a state (or Polish equivalent) named Łódź Voivodeship.

There are definitely many legitimate cases where a city, county, and/or state do share the same name, so we cannot just check for duplicate names and remove them. We have been submitting bugs to Google whenever we are alerted about wrong information coming back from Google maps so that it can be corrected on their side, since we don't have any reliable way on our side to detect erroneous information.

If you're unhappy with the information being provided by Google, you can always click the 'Edit Location Details' link and enter your own data precisely the way you prefer.

Thanks Natalie for that insight.

I read what you wrote at http://help.geni.com/entries/21140691-error-in-city-name

"Whenever possible, we're finding and filling in the county name along with the city in place names."

I hope we would all agree that it is preferable for Geni to default place names to the formats that Geni users find most helpful, and not for the preference to be that Edit Location Details is relied upon.

I have not yet met a Geni user who thinks that Łódź, Łódź, Łódź Voivodeship, Poland is a preferable way to describe Łódź - just as the poster at http://help.geni.com/entries/21140691-error-in-city-name was apparently not enthused by Kenosha, Kenosha, WI, USA

If Geni users aren't finding these useful, maybe it's something Geni.com would consider to change to enhance its users' experiences.

Thank you Natalie for your clarification.

You and Bjorn seem to share the same views in respect of using the Edit Location fields, as do Peter and Eldon.

I tend to think that the most preferable position would be if Geni.com could default place names to the easiest format for Geni users, without them having to rely on Edit Location fields.

Well ... it all depends.

I actually LIKE the geni use of Google "place search" for more "current day" profiles just because it DOES fill in the county without my having to look it up.

Then, when needed, I can fill or correct the info.

What I currently find is that city actually does NOT get put in the expanded fields.

An example is "Woolworth, MS" ... which appears to be known by Google, but when the expanded details is opened up, the city of Woolworth is NOT there ... I have to add it back in by hand. But I don't have to add in the county.

Yes, when the city, county, and state/province all have the same name it can appear to be redundant ... but it's only truly redundant if there are no other counties or cities in that "national subdivision 1" (a.k.a. state / province).

When I only want the "county" and not the city of the same name, then it is simple enough to type "XXX county, state" and the Google place lookup generally handles that nicely (i.e. does NOT fill in the city with the same name).

Private User I do not know enough about the geography of Poland to know if the Łódź information being returned by Google is accurate or not, so let's take the Kenosha, Wisconsin example. There is in fact a city named Kenosha that is in the county of Kenosha. If we have both pieces of data, the name of the city and the name of the county, is there some reason we wouldn't want to display both?

Pam Karp There are some other benefits to using the Google Maps information. For example, unseen to you, we are also able to get the Latitude and Longitude for the location you've entered and therefore display the location of your ancestor to you on a map. It seems that most of the time, the information returned is helpful and accurate, but there are some cases where it's not ideal - for example with historic places that no longer exist. In those cases we do make available the option to edit your location information manually so that it can be exactly as you prefer.

Dan Cornett It sounds like there might be a bug on Google's side with Woolworth. It sounds like they're aware of the county of Woolworth, but not the city. I'll file a bug with them to let them know.

for me it's all about expected behavior.
when i type 'ABC' and it shows me 'ABC' i expect to get 'ABC', not 'XYZ' afterwards which is sometimes the case...

Natalie - thank you for all this information. Many of us are very clearly interested in this area, and some of us are irritated by current Geni behaviour here (rightly or wrongly).

Maybe there are several issues here:

1. Some place names dupes are complete bugs; some may be appropriate.

2. Most people look at Łódź, Łódź, Łódź Voivodeship, Poland or Kenosha, Kenosha, WI, USA and don't get it. They look wrong, whether or not they are wrong. Most Geni users will never see this discussion. There may be some way to improve the presentation in the profile.

3. The information is all there in Edit Location Details, but most don't look at that. rvk's issue is I think really that it's not WYSIWYG - what you see is NOT what you get. You see one thing in the data entry/edit screen; another on the profile. In fact, if you hit edit location details before you save the changes and after you have entered the location, you can see what you will get, but again most don't know that.

4. Current vs historic place names. As Natalie says, there's a value to using the Google Maps current names, even if they are not historically accurate. Natalie - are the Latitude and Longitude data preserved if you edit location details? eg if you change London UK to London England because at the time the UK had not been created? Or edit Zimbabwe to Rhodesia? Or vary St Petersburg vs. Leningrad etc for historical accuracy?

Maybe the lat/lon should be shown in the edit details, so they can be changed also if one knows them (e.g. from using a GPS for a burial site).

Natalie MacLees - the Woolworth city is NOT also the name of the county ... it puts in the county of Lincoln into the details, but not the town of Woolworth. Try it.

These discussions are helpful! Edit Location Fields works if one allows for historic places with name changes.
Natalie MacLees all understood, thank you for your useful information.

What is going on with the search function? Before I create a profile for the Japanese prisoners from Wake Island, Guam and Cavitie project, I do a search to see if there is a similar profile on Geni. I just did one, nothing showed on the search but after I created a profile, Geni showed 489 tree matches. This happens all the time.

guess the search function went berserk...

The match algorithm is much, much looser than the search; it seems to use Soundex matches as well as matching on just first names (at times) .... I don't really know, but that's just observations based on what I've seen.

Is it just me, or is Geni not connecting to the Google Maps API?

I just had a problem too.

Victar I'd say it's disconnected & someone should make sure Geni knows. And we should go work in the 14th century. :)

@Dan

match algorithm being loose? using Soundex matches?
no way!
IMO the algorithm is way too simple and is definitely NOT using Soundex, nor 'starting with' nor 'contains'.
it can't tell the difference between Izaak, Isaac, Izak, Isack etc
if you type even one character wrong it will never find a match. that's how sophisticated this algorithm is...

Geni tried using Soundex/Metaphone in the match algorithm once and it gave mostly bad matches.

Remember that Soundex/Metaphone is an algorithm that work mostly for English names.

rvk -- the SEARCH is indeed simplistic.

I was referring to the MATCHING (i.e.: the list which shows up without you doing any explicit search -- the list from the "green button") -- one seems to have no "control" over what gets matched in that list (nor can it be sorted nor sub-searched by any kind of criteria) ... *that* matching seems much different than when one explicitly searches for people.

Bjørn - maybe not Soundex/Metaphone, but whatever it is, the MATCHing oft seems to show folks rather far from the "referenced" profile.

Dan, - when I talk about matching I talk about the automatic duplicate matching

Search is just search and the results depends on your own input only.

Private User working in profile edit mode, Geni search, or .... ?

@Dan now i understand what you mean

another thing about the green button (in profile view) and the 'magnifying glass' in tree view is that the green button disappears after a potential match was removed, but not so the magnifying glass...at least not right away

@Erica I usually work in tree view. Today I noticed that Geni is no longer suggesting places when trying to edit a place of birth / death of an existing profile. When adding a new profile it's still OK.
However adding a place of marriage can only be achieved by using 'edit location details' for both existing and new profiles.

... yep, I've seen that (Google dynamic location lookup) also broken when editing existing profiles today.

Hello everyone - we spent quite some time investigating today and discovered that Google made some changes on their side, breaking our code.

We're working on updating our code to get that working again.

Thank you, Natalie. Because of the timing I thought it might be a google change. Goes to show you how useful we find the function.

Hm, 'breaking our code' ?

How could this affect adding marriage places to existing and new profiles and birth / death places to existing profiles and not to new profiles ?