Unexpected top results in api calls

REST APIs
#1

Hello!

Firstly, your contact forms on https://developer.tomtom.com/contact-us are both down. I think maybe due to the recaptcha. Oh and the email listed on your Facebook page socialmedia @ tomtom . com doesn’t exist anymore.

I have been testing your API with the search the search of Surrey in Great Britain:

https://api.tomtom.com/search/2/geocode/Surrey.json?typeahead=true&countrySet=GB&entityTypeSet=&key=*****

This returns this result first ( “score”: 2.1554658413, MunicipalitySubdivision): :
{
“type”: “Geography”,
“id”: “GB/GEO/p0/15199”,
“score”: 2.1554658413,
“entityType”: “MunicipalitySubdivision”,
“address”: {
“municipalitySubdivision”: “Surrey Docks”,
“municipality”: “London”,
“countrySecondarySubdivision”: “London”,
“countrySubdivision”: “ENG”,
“countrySubdivisionName”: “England”,
“countryCode”: “GB”,
“country”: “United Kingdom”,
“countryCodeISO3”: “GBR”,
“freeformAddress”: “Surrey Docks, London”
},

rather than (“score”: 2.1199998856, CountrySecondarySubdivision) :

{
“type”: “Geography”,
“id”: “GB/GEO/p0/3083”,
“score”: 2.1199998856,
“entityType”: “CountrySecondarySubdivision”,
“address”: {
“countrySecondarySubdivision”: “Surrey”,
“countrySubdivision”: “ENG”,
“countrySubdivisionName”: “England”,
“countryCode”: “GB”,
“country”: “United Kingdom”,
“countryCodeISO3”: “GBR”,
“freeformAddress”: “Surrey”
},

A) Shouldn’t the CountrySecondarySubdivision come first
B) It feels like Surrey is a direct match but still gets lower score
C) Can I skew the results to get more ‘top level’ results first?

This is happening across multiple places and as such would make the Geocode pretty useless!

Thanks in advance for your help on this!

#2

Hi Tom,

Please find the answers to your points as below:

A) Our goal is to provide results expected by our users. There is no general rule what should be first. Should it be MunicipalitySubdivision or CountrySecondarySubdivision? We can find cases when a different entityType can be expected higher on the list results.
B) During the search process text matching is an important signal for us. We try to match much more data than are available in the response. In the end it can make a difference.
C) Which in your opinion are top level results considering given example?
Search results can be very subjective, that’s why I would be appreciated if you could give us more details what usecase you are trying to solve. We will try to help you.