GeoNames Forum

Hi,
When I use findNearbyPostalCodes webservice and give a lat and lng, and use the name and country code from the resulting data set and hit the search webservice, I sometimes get no results from the search service. Why is this? Shouldn't the same data be returned in both cases? I am basically doing this because I need the geonames id and findNearbyPostalCodes does not return one.

Here's my example:
http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?&lat=35.2897&lng=139.67
this returns:
<name>Kusugaurachou</name>
<countryCode>JP</countryCode>

Now, if I use the search webservice..
http://ws.geonames.org/search?country=JP&name=Kusugaurachou&style=full

I also try to use the parameter q, which the documentation says should search all the place names
http://ws.geonames.org/search?country=JP&q=Kusugaurachou&style=full

but I still get no results. Am I doing something very obviously wrong or is there a workaround to this issue?

Please advice!!
Thanks in advance for your help.

Aarthi

PS: This works fine inside US, Canada and Japan are places I have found this issue with, as of now.

The search and the postal code services are on using different datasets.

Marc

Hi,
thanks for your reply. Is there a workaround/solution to this issue? Can you suggest any other alternate way to retrieve data? All I have is a lat/lng and I am trying to find the nearest populated place. Hitting the postal code webservice seemed like it would cover most of the cases, but unfortunately, this isn't working out very well when I hit the search service after.

thanks
Aarthi