Search Results from Search Bar Need to be Sorted by Distance

[JJGatchalian]

When using the search bar in both the iOS and Android versions of Soundscape from Scottish Tech Army, the search results are in a sort of random order. Also the results in the Android version are not always local, I keep getting places that are thousands of miles away when trying to search for a restaurant chain location near me. A place that's not local should come up if that's the only relevant result. The results should be sorted by distance, which makes the most logical sense. I believe that the other Soundscape apps, Soundscape Community and Voice Vista, already sort by distance, and that could have been the original behavior of Microsoft Soundscape. I may not know for sure because I didn't use the search bar in the original app when it still worked. All I know was that it originally used Bing Maps rather than Apple Maps or Google Maps as in all of todays Soundscape apps.

[davecraig]

This version of Soundscape uses a combination of Android system geo-search and an open street map search. Search also works offline, but that's restricted to about a 10 mile radius for now and requires a local offline map to have been downloaded. The ordering issue is a regression as that wasn't the original behaviour, I suspect it comes from the joining together of the various search sources into a single result list. It should already de-duplicated, but I'll fix the sorting, thanks.

[davecraig]

I realised yesterday what the actual issue is here. Our search code biases results based on the current location, but the Android system search performs the search within a geographical rectangle and we've currently got a very large rectangle (20 degrees of latitude and longitude). If I search on a street address without giving a town e.g. "10 Moor Road" then the top result is likely not to be as relevant as the following results and it might be in a faraway town. However, if I search on "10 Moor Road, Milngavie" then there's one result and it's the one I expect.
It's important that we use the Android system search as when there are often no street numbers mapped in OpenStreetMap and they are present in Android. However, we can do better either by shrinking the rectangle used to search in Android, or starting small and growing it with multiple searches. Then we can decide based on the other results whether or not to use the Android result.