Find a Geocache, not all caches returned

[+igator210]

I was playing around with the filters in Find a Geocache, and I think I found an issue.

 

Just because, I wanted to see how robust the search was. I set Charleston, WV as the search area, distance 500 miles, Cache type set to only Earthcaches, and for the [Cache name contains] section, I just put in the letter "Y". This resulted in 6 caches. I didn't think there would be a lot, but I wanted to see.

 

What caught my attention was that I know of an Earthcache that wasn't on the list that should have been. I changed the [Cache name contains] to "Yo". This came back with 19 results. These should have appeared in the first search, but didn't. However, it still didn't return the one cache I expected. I finally changed [Cache name contains] to "Your" and the cache I was looking for finally came up.

 

For all three searches, each returned list was different with no overlap.

 

This leads me to conclude that if you are searching for a particular word in a geocache, you may or may not see all the caches you should.

[+HHL]

...

Edited February 8, 2017 by HHL

[+barefootjeff]

I was playing around with the filters in Find a Geocache, and I think I found an issue.

 

Just because, I wanted to see how robust the search was. I set Charleston, WV as the search area, distance 500 miles, Cache type set to only Earthcaches, and for the [Cache name contains] section, I just put in the letter "Y". This resulted in 6 caches. I didn't think there would be a lot, but I wanted to see.

 

What caught my attention was that I know of an Earthcache that wasn't on the list that should have been. I changed the [Cache name contains] to "Yo". This came back with 19 results. These should have appeared in the first search, but didn't. However, it still didn't return the one cache I expected. I finally changed [Cache name contains] to "Your" and the cache I was looking for finally came up.

 

For all three searches, each returned list was different with no overlap.

 

This leads me to conclude that if you are searching for a particular word in a geocache, you may or may not see all the caches you should.

I'm seeing the same thing here. If I search with the default 16km from home and put "Re" into Cache Name Contains, it returns only "Katandra Rainforest (Lazarus Edition): Reborn!" but if I put "Ree" it then returns my "Reeves Street or Reeves Road?" cache. A search on just "R" returns a DNF.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

I was playing around with the filters in Find a Geocache, and I think I found an issue.

 

Just because, I wanted to see how robust the search was. I set Charleston, WV as the search area, distance 500 miles, Cache type set to only Earthcaches, and for the [Cache name contains] section, I just put in the letter "Y". This resulted in 6 caches. I didn't think there would be a lot, but I wanted to see.

 

What caught my attention was that I know of an Earthcache that wasn't on the list that should have been. I changed the [Cache name contains] to "Yo". This came back with 19 results. These should have appeared in the first search, but didn't. However, it still didn't return the one cache I expected. I finally changed [Cache name contains] to "Your" and the cache I was looking for finally came up.

 

For all three searches, each returned list was different with no overlap.

 

This leads me to conclude that if you are searching for a particular word in a geocache, you may or may not see all the caches you should.

 

This may have nothing to do with your issue, but I don't remember seeing an announcement about extending the search radius to as high as 500 miles. I noticed that if I put Charleston, West Virginia in for the location it will default to a search distance of 10 miles. If I subsequently change the search distance to some other value (e.g. 500), the go back to the main search box it will use 500 as the default radius for entering some other city name. Has this been the behaviour for awhile and I just missed it?

 

[+igator210]

This may have nothing to do with your issue, but I don't remember seeing an announcement about extending the search radius to as high as 500 miles. I noticed that if I put Charleston, West Virginia in for the location it will default to a search distance of 10 miles. If I subsequently change the search distance to some other value (e.g. 500), the go back to the main search box it will use 500 as the default radius for entering some other city name. Has this been the behaviour for awhile and I just missed it?

 

The PQ limit is 500 miles. The new search function isn't supposed to have any limit. If you wanted to search the entire solar system (their April 2016 announcement) for all the caches that contained the word "happy" you should be able to. My search was just a narrow slice to see how well it worked.

[+Sherminator18]

This may have nothing to do with your issue, but I don't remember seeing an announcement about extending the search radius to as high as 500 miles. I noticed that if I put Charleston, West Virginia in for the location it will default to a search distance of 10 miles. If I subsequently change the search distance to some other value (e.g. 500), the go back to the main search box it will use 500 as the default radius for entering some other city name. Has this been the behaviour for awhile and I just missed it?

 

The PQ limit is 500 miles. The new search function isn't supposed to have any limit. If you wanted to search the entire solar system (their April 2016 announcement) for all the caches that contained the word "happy" you should be able to. My search was just a narrow slice to see how well it worked.

Yes, as of April 2016 you can have any distance for the search radius. If you leave it blank it will search the entire world. I just tried this with no search location for earthcaches that contain "geo" which I thought would be a lot but I only for 43 results in the entire world.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

This may have nothing to do with your issue, but I don't remember seeing an announcement about extending the search radius to as high as 500 miles. I noticed that if I put Charleston, West Virginia in for the location it will default to a search distance of 10 miles. If I subsequently change the search distance to some other value (e.g. 500), the go back to the main search box it will use 500 as the default radius for entering some other city name. Has this been the behaviour for awhile and I just missed it?

 

The PQ limit is 500 miles. The new search function isn't supposed to have any limit. If you wanted to search the entire solar system (their April 2016 announcement) for all the caches that contained the word "happy" you should be able to. My search was just a narrow slice to see how well it worked.

Yes, as of April 2016 you can have any distance for the search radius. If you leave it blank it will search the entire world. I just tried this with no search location for earthcaches that contain "geo" which I thought would be a lot but I only for 43 results in the entire world.

 

It seems like we're talking about two different things here. The OP mentioned a pocket query limit (500 miles) but also using the "Cache name contains" filter which is only available with the new search, which doesn't have a radius limit. I just tried something that can get past the 500 mile limit but still use a PQ. Using a location in cache sparse area (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) I ran search with a radius of 500 miles which returned a list of 249 caches. Then I changed the radius to 600 miles which increased the number of results to 300 miles. After scrolling all the way to the bottom of the results I save them as a list, then created a PQ from the list. The PQ returned all 301 caches.

As far as why the results seam off when using a very short string for "Cache name contains" it's hard to know what's going on without seeing the code to see how the search is implemented. If the search engine is using stop words or stemming, who knows how the search is matching what it's searching.

[+igator210]

 

It seems like we're talking about two different things here. The OP mentioned a pocket query limit (500 miles) but also using the "Cache name contains" filter which is only available with the new search, which doesn't have a radius limit. I just tried something that can get past the 500 mile limit but still use a PQ. Using a location in cache sparse area (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) I ran search with a radius of 500 miles which returned a list of 249 caches. Then I changed the radius to 600 miles which increased the number of results to 300 miles. After scrolling all the way to the bottom of the results I save them as a list, then created a PQ from the list. The PQ returned all 301 caches.

 

Sorry for being slightly ambiguous. I was not referring to PQs. I was referring to the new search function. I chose 500 miles arbitrarily.