number of active caches worldwide

[+trainlove]

http://www.geocaching.com/ says that "There are 653,118 active geocaches around the world."

But in my recent work to give an answer to http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=202425

I get that there are only 601479 caches.

 

Quite a big difference, nearly 10% off.

How is your number calculated?

I got mine today with about 20 minutes of going to eachª of the 253 countries in the search page, and the 244 state/provinces that 15 of those countries contain. From each of those I cut and paste the number (5770) from the statement such as Total Records: 5770 - Page: 1 of 289 - into a spreadsheet.

 

ª using things such as:

seek/nearest.aspx?country_id=2

seek/nearest.aspx?state_id=60

[+Corey]

No need to look at the states if you've looked at the countries, but that difference is strange...

[+trainlove]

No need to look at the states if you've looked at the countries, but that difference is strange...

 

You can't click on a country, as far as I can see, you have to click on individual states. That's the case for the 15 countries that have states/provinces.

State:		Id:
USA		2
Australia		3
Belgium		4
Brazil		34
Canada		5
Germany		79
Ireland		7
Italy		99
New Zealand	9
Norway		147
Portugal		159
South Africa	165
Spain		186
Switzerland	192
United Kingdom	11

 

a portion of a web page I just wrote to help do parts of this for me.

try pressing the USA search below, I have it there only for reference as are theother 14 mentioned.

<a href="http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?country_id=223" target="_blank">Zaire</a><br>
<a href="http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?country_id=224" target="_blank">Zambia</a><br>
<a href="http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?country_id=225" target="_blank">Zimbabwe</a><br><br>

<a href="http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?country_id=2" target="_blank">United States</a><br>
<a href="http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?state_id=60" target="_blank">Alabama (AL)</a><br>
<a href="http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?state_id=2" target="_blank">Alaska (AK)</a><br>

 

Yes, I did it all over again and get nearly the same number, slightly different of course since each minute several caches do get published somewhere.

 

P.S. It used to be that when you did a search such as this, the results page would have the ground zero. I'm going to have to go through hoops to try to replicate that in order to post the 'capital' that I'm trying to calculate.

Edited September 15, 2008 by trainlove

[+Corey]

Oh, didn't realize you couldn't search all USA caches.

[+Raine]

The count is based off the caches that are not archived and are approved.

 

Sorry you wasted 20 min's

[+trainlove]

Sorry you wasted 20 min's

 

Nothing is ever a waste of time.

My exercise has generated some useful information for notthepainters forum post, but nothing that's yet useable there.

[+StarBrand]

I've seen some caches not assigned a "state" - could be caches out there not in a "country".

[+trainlove]

I've seen some caches not assigned a "state" - could be caches out there not in a "country".

 

I sort of thought of that but can't imagine it adds up to ~10%.

There is a country_id for Unknown.

Each of the 15 countries that have states/provinces might, or should, have a state_id for Unknown, but I've tried using all numbers 0 to 999, both country_id and state_id end around 250.

 

But there are no caches that are listed in the Unknown country. They seem to get assigned even if the cache placer leavs that field empty.

Edited September 17, 2008 by trainlove

[+Raine]

My exercise has generated some useful information for notthepainters forum post, but nothing that's yet useable there.

 

Which Post is that?

[+trainlove]

Which Post is that?

 

http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=203989

Sort of the opposite of this post, the center of non-caches.

About 10 minutes after his posting, I emailed him a copy of my spreadsheet. It can be sort of used to find highly cache-underpopulated large-countries and perhaps therefore eventually get the largest distance between caches, or the largest continental-circle that contains no caches.

[+trainlove]

OK, I missed something.

There are 123112 caches in a catch-all category state_id=1.

And 0 more in a country that is not mentioned, gee I thought that there were 3 countries on ITAR list.

I think that everything is square now, well actually somewhat more than square?

 

I hadn't noticed that there were some missing country_id and state_id numbers.

Edited September 17, 2008 by trainlove