GeoNames Forum

Hi Marc

Im using geonames' "name_startsWith"-feature for requesting results for partial geonames and I am having troble with getting the correct result when the search term contains one of the danish characters "Æ", "Ø" or "Å".
København http://ws.geonames.org/search?name_startsWith=K%C3%B8benhavn&maxRows=100&style=FULL&lang=da returns correctly, but if the seach string is reduced to "Kø" http://ws.geonames.org/search?name_startsWith=K%C3%B8&maxRows=100&style=FULL&lang=da I get Taipei as the first hit (perhaps because the indonesian name starts with "Ko"). Similarly a search for "Køge" with only "Køg" http://ws.geonames.org/search?name_startsWith=K%C3%B8g&maxRows=100&style=FULL&lang=da returns "Koganei" before "Køge" although Køge should be a stronger match.

Is this because there is a conversion from "Ø" to "O" in the query? The letters "Æ" and "Å" gives similar results. "Åbe" (for Åbenrå) returns Abeokuta first.

Could this be related to the ASCII conversion bug you mentioned in this post? http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/1666.page

Thanks in advance
Frederik

the behavior of the name_startsWith search service has been changed to overcome the issues pointed out in this thread.
The service now does a sorting with a certain name similarity of the top 200 rows.
If you are particularly interested in a country we also suggest to use the countryBias parameter to list the hits for this country on top.

Marc