Location does not include surrounding areas?!

The deeper I dig into GD, the more I’m liking some things and disliking others. (Unfortunately you’re only hearing about the problems I’m finding since this is support.) While testing, I’ve been working with a dataset for a single location. I learned that I made a mistake doing this because now that I’ve added listings in a new location, I discovered something which I can’t figure out how to work around and it may have just stopped me in my tracks….. 8(

When using the Location selection feature on the front end, the listings and map that appear after selecting a location are for that specific location only and do not take into consideration the surrounding area. This is, I believe, a fundamental break with the way people search for things.

For example, if I select the location “Boston” then the only listings that are returned are within this blue outlined area:

That’s a huge problem. It excludes the many fine establishments that may be across the river in Cambridge or across the street in Brookline:

And I can’t solve this by selecting a region, because that would show me the entire state of Massachusetts. The only answer I’ve found in the forums on this problem is to use search. Search for an area and the map will display results from that place and the surrounding area based on the distance set in GD > General > Search.

This would be ok (not great) IF my users know to only use the search feature. It effectively means I should turn off the Location feature to avoid confusion, which is something I don’t want to do. The location function was probably my #1 reason for purchasing! One workaround I thought about was performing searches ahead of time and saving the result URLs as menu items, but that defeats the whole point of using a dynamic data based directory and the location function.

There could be another way, but it would mean adding an extra configuration option to GD.

What if the Locations settings also had a radius area option that could defined?

The benefit of this approach is that you’ve already got a specific coordinate defined for a location and every listing also has a specific set of coordinates. Calculating everything that falls within a radius of the location shouldn’t be difficult. There could be a single site-wide radius defined as a default, but it would be even better to do that and allow each location to have a custom radius set. A location like Boston will need a bigger radius than a place in the middle of the country.

Of course, as always, the Location listings that result really should be sortable.