GeoNames Forum

Hi, can anyone shed any light on how the results of a /search are scored? I've been doing some experimentation and am finding some confusing results. For example, here is a search for "Bennington" using cities1000:

http://api.geonames.org/search?username=demo&style=full&fcode=ADM1&fcode=ADM1H&fcode=PPL&fcode=PPLA&fcode=PPLA2&fcode=PPLA3&fcode=PPLA4&fcode=PPLC&fcode=PPLCH&name=Bennington&type=xml&lang=en&maxRows=10&cities=cities1000

The results are:

A PPL called "Long Bennington" in the UK, population 1884

A PPL called "Bennington" in Nebraska USA, population 1458

A PPL called "North Bennington" in Vermont USA, population 1643

A PPL called "Bennington" in Vermont USA, population 9074

I would have assumed that an exact match with a higher population (the last one in the list) would score better. What dictates this ordering?

Sorry to reply to my own post, but is this forum dead? It took over two weeks for my question to get moderator-approved, and it seems like very few questions are being answered. Should I be looking elsewhere for geonames technical discussion?