Places enhancement suggestion: filter obvious words out of "Other Topics" autosearches?

[finlero]

As I've worked more and more with Places, I've been impressed with the "Other Topics" autosearch. I like that it can reference topics mentioning a given place without the need for an explicit Place link.

Having said that, the autosearch is rather limited by its literalness right now. The biggest issue is if the word "restaurant" shows up in the title. Let's take a place that was recently updated on Boston's Places, Reno's Italian Restaurant. Even though there are a few topics that reference it on the Boston board (http://www.chowhound.com/topics/471021 , for example), they don't show up in the autosearch, because most people just refer to it as "Reno's", not "Reno's Italian Restaurant".

Another would be "Santarpio's Pizza", which most Boston hounds just call "Santarpio's".

Is there any way that the autosearch could be honed to be a smidge less literal, discarding a few words, definitely "Restaurant", but perhaps some ethnicities or cuisines (Chinese, Italian, Pizza, Hot Dogs...) as well? I know it's already filtering out a few things like apostrophe-S and the like, so it seems there's a precedent.

P.S. One alternative might be to have a "nicknames" field for autosearching. For example, Santarpio's is often called "Santarp's"...

[rworange]

I have some other bug questions, but in response to your post ... one suggestion is to link to places when someone writes a report. This is especially useful when a restaurant does an insane thing like call themselves "B" or "Q" which are virtually unsearchable if there wasn't an explicit link in Places
http://www.chow.com/places/11537
http://www.chow.com/places/27961

Another not as good suggestion is to shorten the title in the place record ... make it "Reno's". The reason this isn't as good in the long run as doing explicit links when reading a report is that it screws up the search when trying to link. Someone search for the whole name "Reno's Restaurant" will not find it when linking. Which leads to duplicates like the above mentioned "q". I shortened it to hopefully pick up some implicit links, and it looks like someone tried to find "q restaurant" and it created a duplicate.
http://www.chow.com/places/11537
http://www.chow.com/places/12104

It would be nice if the search within a post worked the same way as the search from the main places page which displays all records with the words searched on.
http://www.chow.com/search?search%5Bq...

I know there are bigger things to fix, but it has been about a year since these Places bugs have been reported and I'm wondering if they are in some sort of bug que

- ignoring the comma in the city/state field ... that creates endless duplicates because a place record with San Francisco, Ca will not be found if it is entered without the comma.

- fixing the freeze when adding a record that google can't find.

- dealing with addresses that Google isn't happy with

Some cosmetic changes that would be nice is that rather than saying "link to a place" it said something like "Link this report to Places". Otherwise people just link to Places primarily to give address info to someone linking ... ie ...

Question: Where's the best place for pizza?
Answer: Santarpio's

The person who answers then proceeds to link to the place record. In fact there are some posters who go out of the way to put that address link in. So when trying to find info about restaurants and going to places that link doesn't give any info.other than to go there.

[Melanie Wong]

"- ignoring the comma in the city/state field ... that creates endless duplicates because a place record with San Francisco, Ca will not be found if it is entered without the comma."

Do you have an example of this? I tried to replicate it to find the record, http://www.chow.com/places/3846 , which has a comma in the address field. I typed "bang san" for the name and "san francisco ca" for location, and it finds it just fine. And something I just discovered now that has changed since the last time I checked a week or so ago, entering "san francisco" without the state will also find this place record. However entering "sf" alone, will not. This might be a very recent change . . . let's see how it goes tomorrow.

Thanks for bringing this up. The number of duplicates in the SF area Places database has been crazy. I remove about 20 per day (yes, i count them periodically), which is more than 50% of the new entries (excluding those created by you or me from the denominator). And, the Chow staffers who one would think would be better at it than casual readers seem to make an even higher percentage of duplicates in their entries. This hasn't been a viable system so far, but I guess it's still in beta. Hopefully this will do the trick.

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Bang San Thai Cuisine (Original
)505 Jones St, San Francisco, CA 94102

[rworange]

Hmmm ... did this JUST get fixed. Here's an example from today
http://www.chowhound.com/topics/53655...

Almost every single correction you made had to do with the missing comma.

Sometimes I like the duplicate ... as mentioned above ... people use places to display street address with no info other than "Go to xxx". Those non-ireports don't get linked to the Place record.

However, with a legit report like the one above, that might get lost if just left with the duplicate link.

[Melanie Wong]

In the 24-hour period ending at 10am PDT today, I marked three duplicate Place records, and maybe there were some that others removed. Yesterday felt like a slow traffic day on the SF Bay Area board with fewer posts and fewer links to a place. However, that's still a lot fewer dupe Place records than the trend.

[Melanie Wong]

In the 24-hours ending at 4:30 pm PDT today, I observed eight duplicate Place records: Incanto, Bix, Orbit Room, Blue Plate, R&G Lounge, Terra, Martini House, and Asia SF. Maybe there were more that I didn't see. Today seemed pretty typical in traffic and linking on the board, so the recent changes have helped reduce the number of duplicate records.