2.4 million places to go!
How does Dopplr know which city you mean when you type in your destination? It looks up the name in a database, and tries to find a match. We have information on over 150,000 world cities but several travellers have asked for better coverage. So we’ve been doing some work behind the scenes to improve it.
It’s difficult to get the location right every time, for lots of reasons; partly because the same place name might be spelt differently in different languages; partly because there are many places that share the same name.
We call our database “the gazetteer”. We’ve been adding new technology to make it work smarter, including data from a free service called Geonames. Geonames makes this possible by kindly licensing their data using a Creative Commons license.
Our aim is to add all the cities Geonames knows to our gazetteer. We’re adding 100,000 new cities every day, and will keep doing so until we’ve got information on 2.4 million places around the globe.
We’re also including destinations that aren’t cities – things like islands, national parks, and ski resorts. So in future, Dopplr is more likely to recognise names of places you’re travelling to. We’ve made other changes to the gazetteer too, tweaks to the way it guesses which destination you mean when lots of locations share the same name.
Finally, we’re now taking a nightly data feed from Geonames, which means that newly added or edited cities will also be incorporated into our database. So if there’s a place you care about that isn’t in Dopplr, you could help us and the whole Geonames community by going to Geonames and contributing the information.
This smarter, faster gazetteer will hopefully make Dopplr easier to use. Please contact us if you have any questions about it.
How about including musical festivals? Each is like a temporary mini-city in itself, particularly the outdoor ones…
Why stop there? How about trade shows, expos and the like?
Congrats on a great service!
I totally agree with Carl.
This way I could extend the use of Dopplr to where I’m currently always..
And Dopplr rules!!!
Since this is all about traveling, there must be Travel Agency or Travel Industry databases with tourist destinations. May destinations may be resorts in the middle of nowhere.
It would be great if Dopplr could moderate the fanaticism of its auto-lookup feature now that you’ve implemented the Geonames lookup. Frinstance, I’m going to Leh, which is in the Ladakh region of India. Dopplr assumes I mean the “LEH” airport code and autocompletes my entry as Le Havre, France. That’s sub-par!
So, thinking I can second-guess Dopplr, I find the airport code for Leh, which is “IXR”. But then Dopplr decides that it should autocomplete my entry by choosing what it thinks is the nearest “big city” which it nominates as Jamshedpur. Sorry Dopplr, but selecting Jamshedpur for Leh is like selecting Houston for Seattle – the other side of the country!
Never mind that there are a great many bigger cities closer to Leh than Jamshedpur, it would be much smarter of Dopplr to bring up a list of likely matches than just select one it thinks is best.
I understand that what you’re striving for is ease of use, but this is as close to ease of use as Leh is to Jamshedpur!
Alan,
Sorry to hear our system isn’t working quite right for you. For some reason Leh isn’t showing up in searches and so the autocomplete isn’t suggesting it. It is in the database, however: http://www.dopplr.com/place/in/leh
If you start at that page and hit “Add a trip” on the top right of the page, it should work. When you add a trip starting from a place page, the autocomplete doesn’t try to step in. We’ll try to find out why Leh isn’t in the search index.
Matt.
Hiya
I have noticed this bug too… place names are in there but airport codes are not. Examples: SXM, GND, and FTE.
Cheers!
love it! \(^_^)/
Peculiar aim taken…..funny…the gazetteer have to play a vital role here.Wish you best of luck.
Very cool. The Gazetteer solves gnarly problem that many. many online travel sites struggle with and few handle elegantly.
Would Dopplr license this disambiguation logic out to other travel sites?
Yes, this is a good idea -places like EuroDisney should be added: many business conferences take place there and there’s no reason Orlando’s Mickey Evil Kingdom is there but not the one in Europe!
Also, would be great if Dopplr understood UK Postcodes in the Location field as they can be pinpointed on a map to the side of a street block, even to individual buildings in some places.