Tag: maps

Search interfaces

Ugh. I just did a search on streetmap.co.uk for a latitude and longitude reference and it didn’t recognise it. I spotted the radio button to tell it what kind of search I’m doing and clicked again. Still no luck. Removing the comma between the two numbers got me what I wanted.

It is not difficult to detect when someone is searching for a latitude and longitude. It is a pair of floating point numbers with 13 decimal places. Who lives on a street named with 13 decimal places? How many businesses are named with just numbers such that I would require 13 decimal places to tell them apart?

And then, after the user goes out of their way to tell your software what to expect, why not accept a few variations of the input (though one lousy comma would hardly count as a variation to me).

I’d be better off with a pencil sketch map and a divining rod. No wonder these services are losing all their business to services like Google maps.