Unpredictable Use Cases - An Exercise in Ambiguity

One of the trickier parts of developing an application is dealing appropriately with input and interaction that doesn't follow the exact model that you envision. In particular, we have to deal with "location" strings that may not map precisely to a location in google maps. Google maps does return an accuracy value to HTTP geocoding requests, but even when accuracy is low or the input is ambiguous, google will only return a single response. It would be great if we could present a "did you mean THIS, THIS, or THIS?" and show a map marker for each one, but we don't know if that's possible. So the best we can do is decide on an accuracy threshold that we will accept - we chose 4, which means that google can find the city, on the assumption that a person choosing to set their location will at least decide to specify their city. Ambiguity is still a major problem though - searching for "UCSD" is very ambiguous, and the top result that google currently returns is actually a location off campus. Currently we are just planning to reject such <4 inputs and request users to rephrase them or override the rejection, but if I get time before our presentation we will hopefully allow unknown locations to be added to our database (as mentioned in an earlier entry).