Problems with Advanced Search

[ggconrad]

The biggest problem with Advanced Search is that it doesn't work. When you push the "Go Find It" button, nothing happens. It doesn't matter if you've entered text in for Address, Place, or Person. It doesn't matter if there's text in 2 or 3 fields... or 0 for that matter... the button does nothing.

Second problem: Aside from sorting it into the 3 categories, Advanced Search doesn't really have any advanced search options. There's no keyword field and no associated search fields for street, city, zip, state, etc. I can't do a successful search for, say, "Darlene" (street name) in "Estancia" (city), "New Mexico" (state).

Third problem: Neither Search nor Advanced Search has any capability to search using latitude/longitude coordinates. I would think that Advanced Search would be the perfect place to store this feature since standard keyboards lack a "degrees" symbol. Advanced Search could have multiple fields for degrees, minutes, and seconds with a short drop down menu to specify whether it's East or West, or North or South. It could even allow you to choose whether you wanted to enter your longitude and latitude in the degrees/minutes/seconds format or the decimal format, as other mapping websites out there (like Google Maps or Google Earth) display coordinates in degrees.

Why would anyone need to search using coordinates? Sometimes, there are household locations so remote that Search has a hard time finding the street address. (Try searching for "131 Darlene Dr., Estancia, New Mexico 87016" using the Beta software. This probably occurs because various mapping systems are a lot more likely to take notice of streets in populated cities and a lot less likely to take notice of some "dirt road in the middle of nowhere" even though that dirt road has a registered name). In such instances, having longitude/latitude searching capabilities would prove immensely useful as opposed to eyeballing the location by comparing it to another mapping system's plotting.

Fourth problem: Beta has no ability to search by street intersections, say at the intersection of "Darlene Dr." and "Clara Ln." in "Estancia, New Mexico"... or even "Montgomery" and "Eubank" in "Albuquerque, New Mexico".

FYI: The coordinates for the above address is as follows, just in case you try to reproduce this problem in an effort to provide such functionality: 34 degrees, 49 minutes, 23.12 seconds North; 106 degrees, 4 minutes, 12.23 seconds West. And yes I'm aware it's still very much an "Approximate Location".