When you search for GCA caches here http://geocaching.com.au/caches/gca/au/tas/ is there any way a third box could be added to refine the area. That way you have-
-Australia
-State
-Town
Download GCA Caches as: GPX ZIP RSS
This would then help when you go and view 'View As: GoogleMaps ' as it would take you to a more local reagion.
Just an idea.
Increase Search option
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caughtatwork
- Posts: 17025
- Joined: 17 May 04 12:11 pm
- Location: Melbourne
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Re: Increase Search option
I like the idea.
There are (as an example) some 2,666 unique locales listed that have caches in NSW. Locales that don't have caches wouldn't appear in the selection list as we don't know about that locale. Up until recently we used the co-ordinates of the cache and looked up a postcode table to determine the closest suburb as the locale. Where there were multiple suburbs listed for the same postcode we chose the "first one" returned, not necessarily the most "well known one". Adding to this challenge is that sometimes the locale would be wrong as the closest locale returned was for the next suburb, depending on exactly where the cache was and where the postcode centroid was.
So if we were to allow a search by locale the results returned would be quite variable.
The implementation could be annoying for some people. With 2,666 (NSW) locales to be returned, we would need to output in the HTML, the full list of 2,666 locales so people could select it. An example page of caches via the caches link for NSW is 170kB. Adding the selection list adds approximately 145kB to the page almost doubling the size of the page to be received by the user. Broadband users won't notice. Dialup users (and yes we do have a number) would suffer. At 56kbps = 7.5kBps. 170kB takes 22 seconds to get. 315kB would take 42 seconds to get. That's a large increase in time.
There is an alternative, but not quite as nice as you suggest. In a My Query, you can add in a "Sort by Closest to" option where you can sort by either Waypoint, Postcode, HOME, Co-ordinates. So if you have a locale that you know the postcode for (or you can use Google to look it up for you), then a My Query can provide the caches sorted by distance from that postcode.
Example:
http://geocaching.com.au/my/query/gmap/3766
This is set to show 100 available GCA caches sorted by closest distance to 7250 which is the postcode for Launceston. Using a My Query you can also set the cache types, size, terrain, difficulty, etc, so you get much more flexibility in what you output.
I like the idea of the locale on that search page and will think about ways to do it, but given the constraints as described above, it may not come to fruition in the short term.
I would suggest you add your idea (and a link to this thread) in the wiki. That way we don't lose visibility of the community wishes. At some point we might think of a clever way to do this.
http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/Geoc ... pment_List
There are (as an example) some 2,666 unique locales listed that have caches in NSW. Locales that don't have caches wouldn't appear in the selection list as we don't know about that locale. Up until recently we used the co-ordinates of the cache and looked up a postcode table to determine the closest suburb as the locale. Where there were multiple suburbs listed for the same postcode we chose the "first one" returned, not necessarily the most "well known one". Adding to this challenge is that sometimes the locale would be wrong as the closest locale returned was for the next suburb, depending on exactly where the cache was and where the postcode centroid was.
So if we were to allow a search by locale the results returned would be quite variable.
The implementation could be annoying for some people. With 2,666 (NSW) locales to be returned, we would need to output in the HTML, the full list of 2,666 locales so people could select it. An example page of caches via the caches link for NSW is 170kB. Adding the selection list adds approximately 145kB to the page almost doubling the size of the page to be received by the user. Broadband users won't notice. Dialup users (and yes we do have a number) would suffer. At 56kbps = 7.5kBps. 170kB takes 22 seconds to get. 315kB would take 42 seconds to get. That's a large increase in time.
There is an alternative, but not quite as nice as you suggest. In a My Query, you can add in a "Sort by Closest to" option where you can sort by either Waypoint, Postcode, HOME, Co-ordinates. So if you have a locale that you know the postcode for (or you can use Google to look it up for you), then a My Query can provide the caches sorted by distance from that postcode.
Example:
http://geocaching.com.au/my/query/gmap/3766
This is set to show 100 available GCA caches sorted by closest distance to 7250 which is the postcode for Launceston. Using a My Query you can also set the cache types, size, terrain, difficulty, etc, so you get much more flexibility in what you output.
I like the idea of the locale on that search page and will think about ways to do it, but given the constraints as described above, it may not come to fruition in the short term.
I would suggest you add your idea (and a link to this thread) in the wiki. That way we don't lose visibility of the community wishes. At some point we might think of a clever way to do this.
http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/Geoc ... pment_List