How search finds cities

This page tells why a city ranks first, why a text finds no city, and how to match a list of city names from a file.

Names

Autocomplete and search find a city by each of its names, in all languages, and by its historic names. Names in other scripts, such as Москва or 東京, find the city directly. Search does not convert them to Latin letters.

The match ignores case, accents, and punctuation, so sao paulo finds São Paulo. A St at the start of a name is equal to Saint.

A result always shows the current name in the requested language, also if the text matched a historic name.

Autocomplete or search

Autocomplete is for a text that a person types. It returns cities with a name that starts with the text.

Search is for a full name, such as a name from a file or a form. It tries these matches in this order, and stops at the first match that finds cities:

1. The exact name.
2. The name without a word such as City.
3. A name that starts with the text.
4. A name with one typo.

Both routes return no cities for a text of fewer than 2 characters. Both accept a name with one typo only for a text of 4 or more characters.

Country and region after a comma

In search, the text after the last comma selects the country or the region. Burlington, Vermont returns the city in Vermont. The text after the comma can be a country name, a country code, or a region name.

If the text is the name of a region or a country, search applies a strict rule. Search returns only a city with this name that is a capital, the seat of a region, or a city of 500,000 or more people. California returns no city, and not California, Maryland. This rule does not apply if the request gives a region.

Ranking

The rank of a city uses the quality of the match, the population, and the place type. Autocomplete also uses the number of names of the city in other languages. The main name of a city is its English name or its name in the source data. Each other name is an alias.

• A large city with a name that starts with the text ranks above a small city with the exact name.
• A large city with the exact text as a name in another language ranks above a small city with the exact text as its main name.
• A capital ranks higher, and a district ranks lower.
• A city on a list of well-known cities ranks higher.

The match field

Each result of autocomplete and search has match:

Match city names from a file

To find the ID of each city in a file, such as a CSV export of customers, send each name to Search:

1. Add the region or the country after a comma, such as Springfield, Illinois or Porto, PT. If the file has a country column, send it in the country parameter.
2. Accept the first result only if its match is exact or alias, and no other result has exact or alias.
3. Put each other row in a list for a person to check.

A prefix or fuzzy match is a guess. Two exact matches mean that the name is not unique: Springfield with no region gives many cities with the exact name.