GeoNames Forum

Hi,
I am new to this website and data and this is my first post so plz pardon if I am asking already asked question.

I am trying to do city -> country lookup. I have downloaded the data for all countries. But the issue is, for same city there are multiple matches in multiple countries. So I want to find the best match. Best match is little vague here but

For e.g. when I search for 'Moscow' on UI, Moscow in Russia is the first result which is what I want. But if I just grep through the downloaded data, there are almost 30 records in Russia, US etc. There is no way to priortize.

Does anybody have any idea on how the records are priortized on UI or results returned by this web service?
http://api.geonames.org/search?q=Moscow&maxRows=10&username=demo

Thanks