Recently active topics in Brightkite tagged with lookup

Brightkite often does a terrible job at location search (examples provided below).

I often try to check in using the "?" syntax, but then give up and forget about it because Brightkite returns such terrible results.

Based on the results I get from Brightkite, it looks like you're just using the Yahoo Location Search API. So it's not really your fault, but ... yeah.

You guys really, really should move to Google's Local Search API (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearc...) or to some other geo API that returns better results:

Here are a few real world examples:
___________________________________________
(1) "?vinyl room" near San Mateo, CA

The "Vinyl Room" is a bar in nearby Burlingame, CA.

Brightkite returns these results:
http://brightkite.com/places/search?q...

A bunch of furniture shops and flooring specialists. Wrong. The real "Vinyl Room" is nowhere to be found in those results at all.

Correct answer:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=l&hl=en...

Google gets it right.

I tried checking in from Vinyl Room the other day. Was there with a bunch of friends and hoped to show off how bad ass Brightkite was. But Brightkite SMS and I went back and forth a ton of times with incorrect results before I just gave up.

___________________________________________
(2) "?xyz" near San Mateo, CA

"XYZ" is a bar in downtown San Francisco, approximately 20 miles away from San Mateo.

Brightkite returns these results:
http://brightkite.com/places/search?q...

OK, I get the ones that have "XYZ" in the title. But after the top few, the rest of the results don't even have "xyz" in the business name. Why are they appearing? Well, here's the answer.

Yahoo LocalSearch results for this search:
http://local.yahooapis.com/LocalSearc...

Look at the "US Auto Glass Center" result. Yahoo is returning that business in this result set because someone included the string "XYZ" in a review for that business. (See the [LastReviewIntro] XML node.)

Ugh. Brightkite users in the SF Bay Area are getting incorrect results for a bar in downtown SF ... because somebody on Yahoo! did a review of a glass maker and had "XYZ" in their review?

That's really, really bad.

Correct answer? Google.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=l&hl=en...

Result #1 is XYZ, the bar in downtown San Francisco. Nailed it.

I could go on with more examples, but the general gist is:

Brightkite team, we love you! But please investigate using some other API besides Yahoo Location Search for your location lookups.