Search and Near not working

[Lara]

Hello, I have a dummy event with this addfess: 400 East 4th Street, Reno, NV 89512 United States.
When I search for Neveada or NV or United States, I get no results.

This is also happening with another event which it’s location is set to Croatia. When I search for “Croatia” in the near field or the search field I get 0 results. Why is this happening?

Thanks

[Brook]

Howdy Lara,

That’s a good question. The location search unfortunately does not, and can not, work like that. What it does it “geocodes” a point on the map based on what you typed in. If you type in Nevada, then you get back a point on the map that is the exact center of Nevada. Then, any event within 200 miles of that point (center of NV) will be returned. If your event is in Southern or Northern Nevada though, it will not show. Same thing goes for Croatia.

Obviously you have to wonder why on earth it works that way. The reason is that returning every event within California’s actual bounds is a super hard task for the server. It’s possible, but the website server would have to think on it for a very long time. The extreme majority of WordPress web servers are nowhere near powerful enough to be able to do that. It might take many minutes just to load the webpage. Unfortunately this is a limit of WordPress and the technologies it is built on. There is not much that can be done to work around it in the present system.

I am sure that is not the answer you wanted. 🙁 I wish I had a better one. But hopefully the extra knowledge will help you. Some folks in your shoes, with events spread our over thousands of miles versus hundreds, have chosen just to disable Location Search. Some display a list of venues instead. Maybe one of those would work for you?

Please let me know if I can be of further assistance. Cheers!

– Brook

[Lara]

Why is the search not based on what one has entered into the country or state fields? That would make the most sense. Is this a WordPress-defined thing or your plugin that searches based on “geocodes”?

[Brook]

Howdy again Lara!

I would be happy to clarify.

Why is the search not based on what one has entered into the country or state fields?

From the searchers perspective there is only one field, the search box. So they will be unaware or any information you input in a separate Country or State field from the backend.

Is this a WordPress-defined thing or your plugin that searches based on “geocodes”?

Geocodes are just how computers do searches. They are more of a computer thing.

The more I think on this there might be a way to allow you to search for anything near 200 miles of an address or within a county/province/country. It would likely slow down our search queries by about half, but that is as not as bad as it could be. If you are keen for such a feature, please request is on our feature suggestion page. Then others interested in it could vote. If I were you I would word it like this so that people who are interested in similar stuff will vote on it: “Make location search work when searching by state/province/country” I bet you a number of people would be interested in a feature like that. And the more votes the more likely it is to get built.

Does that make sense now? Is there anything I can clarify or assist with?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Lara]

I have replied to a pre-existing suggestion here https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/5113103-allow-the-search-near-location-to-be-by-state-pr and added my vote and comment there. Thanks!

[Brook]

Ahh thank you Lara! I had forgotten about that feature request. I am glad you found it.

– Brook

[Author]

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