Search by Neighborhood problems
 

Since we got such good results on the sort by distance problem, let me try bringing this one up.....


The assignment of restaurants to neighborhoods is VERY buggy. Here are three examples:

1. Look for Upstate NY - Western NY - Buffalo - Rochester and do a map view. There are three screens worth of restaurants, and about 6 (or so) of them are clearly NOT in Western NY. They belong in the Upstate NY - Central - Finger Lakes neighborhood.

2. Also - Upstate NY has a neighborhood called "upstate NY" that seems to overlap the Central-Finger Lakes neighborhood for no good reason.

3. Finally, the new web site has bugs in the neighborhood clear all function. If you check clear all, instead it display ALL restaurants in all of upstate NY. If you try to uncheck a neighborhood, the same thing happens.

I've seen similar problems all over the country - these problems are NOT unique to upstate NY.

Thank you for your feedback adzel - I'm passing it on to our web team. They'll investigate and we'll try to get a solution in place.

Best regards,
Elizabeth, on behalf of Rewards Network

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Yes, unfortunately, there have been chronic problems (putting it mildly) with the search feature for a long time. And the newest version of search is an even worse piece of junk. :td:

Searching in the San Francisco Bay Area, I often turn up restaurants that are as far away as 400 to 500 miles (Los Angeles and San Diego areas). :td:

And even some restaurants that actually ARE in San Francisco have the wrong neighborhood assigned. Totally misleading.

Big waste of time for us customers, AND I'm sure the restaurant owners are getting messed up by this as well, not to mention RN/idine itself. Just a lose-lose-lose proposition all around.

It really annoys me that customers are, de facto, expected to perform website testing. If you want me to test your website for you, why don't you PAY me for doing so, rather than just wasting my time and causing me NOT to be able to find places to eat? :confused:

Does anyone here value the 'search by neighborhood' feature? In the years I've been playing the RN game, I've found searching by ZIP or address to be more accurate than the assigned 'neighborhoods' iDine defines.

I should have been clearer -- it isn't just the "search by neighborhood" feature that is problematic. Search by zip code often malfunctions as well, returning many results that are hundreds of miles away. :mad:

In other words, the Search feature, overall, has a number of serious problems. (Oh, and how about the fact that it often returns duplicates, as you page through the results?)

I see what you mean. I have found restaurants in the past that were supposedly within a specifc ZIP code, but were quite far. It rarely happens though. I just search by specific address (even if I have to get it via GPS if I'm on the road) to avoid any possible snafus.