GeoNames Forum

Hello,

I am trying to add a worldwide city/town autocomplete search box to my weather website. However, I am having trouble getting the returned results from the search web service to be ordered by population for some queries.

Say a user wants to search for the USA city of Philadelphia, so they start by typing “phil”. If I make this api call:

http://api.geonames.org/searchJSON?name=phil&orderby=population&maxRows=200

Why is Philadelphia not included in the 158 returned records? As far as I know, Philadelphia is the largest city in the world that begins with “phil”, so I would expect it to be the first thing returned, but it’s not even in the returned set. The first result is “Phil Campbell” which has a population of 1235, while Philadelphia’s population is about 1.6 million.

I’ve tried adding different combinations of using q instead of name, adding featureClass=P, name_StartsWith=phil, changing orderby to relevance, but nothing has been successful. If I search for “phila”, with one more character instead, Philadelphia is returned successfully at #1 however.

Can anyone provide any guidance on what I may be doing incorrectly? Or offer any advice on a different approach that would achieve the same thing? Are there any examples available that might show better types of calls for a worldwide city/town autocomplete search? Thanks.

Hi

The parameter is called name_startsWith:

http://api.geonames.org/searchJSON?name_startsWith=phil&orderby=population&maxRows=200

Best Regards

Marc

Marc,

Thanks for the quick reply. While name_startsWith fixes the issue for "phil", why doesn't it work for "phi"?

http://api.geonames.org/searchJSON?name_startsWith=phi&orderby=population&maxRows=200

Philadelphia is returned as result #3, despite having higher populations than the first and second results.

Hi,
I have the same problem - trying to get a list of the largest places starting with "B", don't know what is wrong about the query:

https://ws.geonames.net/search?name=B&placename_startsWith=B&lang=en&isNameRequired=true&lang=en&maxRows=10&orderby=population&featureClass=P&inclBbox=true&style=FULL&username=volcanodiscovery&token=...

Expect cities like Beijing, Berlin, Belgrad to show up in the top of the list, sorted by their population, but it returns lots of small places in seemingly random order instead.

Thank you for help!
Tom