Issue of returning erroneous results. about yelp-api

[mittonk]

@andrewmarmion : I sometimes see this when combining distance and category filters, or similar.

What's your actual query, and what results are you receiving (both in and outside the radius)? That'll help debug the issue.

[andrewmarmion]

https://api.yelp.com/v2/search/?ll=39.3726427,-76.6491456&radius_filter=1000&category_filter=bars

It gives 3 results, the last one is well outside the radius.

[mittonk]

OK, I see:

• http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-nickel-taphouse-baltimore : 684.893163987737
• http://www.yelp.com/biz/mt-washington-tavern-baltimore-2 : 634.8338865971878
• http://www.yelp.com/biz/m-v-bay-breeze-chesapeake-city : 73818.47505576596

Yeah, that's not close. Poking.

[mittonk]

Ah! http://www.yelp.com/biz/m-v-bay-breeze-chesapeake-city has a "service area" polygon that covers the search area --- it's a boat, a "traveling floating bar" for the purpose of this search. You can see the polygon on the map at that URL.

The dock (central location) is 73km away.

Well, that's the problem. Now to see what to do about it...

[andrewmarmion]

@mittonk Thanks for looking into this.

[andrewmarmion]

@mittonk Just to let you know, I was able to resolve the issue by coding a check of the distance when I add the data to my struct.

[mittonk]

@andrewmarmion : That sounds like excellent post-processing for your application. That won't work for every use case, which why we haven't done that in general.

[watterso]

TL;DR: Search picked this up based on the service area of this business. I'm calling this as desired behavior. To address this issue api-users should filter results by distance (a field returned in each search result) if they don't want businesses that are returned because of service area.