Make Search Results Deterministic

Searches often return different results when repeated. Or, omit results that ought to be returned. Here are some examples of searches that don’t return results that you’d expect. I first noticed this searching for the Mallory Paint Store in Gig Harbor, WA USA with the terms “Mallory” and “Mallory Paint” on iOS (I can't show the whole result in a screen capture since it requires scrolling, hopefully you’ll trust me that the store was not found).

On the web version of ABRP, the search term “mallory” finds the local paint store. The behavior is really odd, and frustrating because you can’t count on the results being “honest.” It also greatly increases the workload on the driver if you are trying to search for a POI while driving.

Here are the beginning of the searches:

The second result is much better, almost good enough to convince one that maybe the store doesn’t exist… But, using the web version, it can be found near the bottom of the results.

Here is one set of results for “london:”

But that can’t be right. Jack London is a major cultural figure in the US (well at least a major minor cultural figure), if I search for “jack london” I get:

So, there were a ton of matches of “london” that weren’t found in the first search, as well as some results that don’t seem to make any sense (for example the InstaVolt & allego chargers) or that require local knowledge to make sense of (the Amtrak station).