Plak

There seems to be some confusion with regard to the various search functions in Plak. I hope that the following will clarify the situation. There are three different types of search available on Plak, and I’ll explain how each works (Or is supposed to work) below: -

Search Locations

This search ties into Google’s geocoding service. It does not search Plak for listed places of interest. It is simply a convenience search for locating towns, cities, suburbs and streets in South Africa. Before I continue I should explain that Google’s geocoding service is very incomplete for South Africa. However, it is being updated all the time, and almost everyday it becomes more accurate.

Here is how it works: -

Say you are looking for Lynnwood, a suburb of Pretoria. If you only supply the word Lynnwood as the search criteria, you will probably get a Not found message.

But if you supply Lynnwood Pretoria as the search criteria, you get a result.

If you now hover your mouse over the search result, two things should happen. 1. The search result will be highlighted in blue and 2. A small red X will be displayed on the map showing where Lynnwood Pretoria is. Of course if Lynnwood Pretoria isn’t within the current display area of the map, you won’t see the red X.

If you click the search result, the map will center itself on that particular location, and the red X should be smack in the middle of the map.

Finding streets works in the same way, with the exception that sometimes Google’s geocoding service will find the actual street number, and sometimes it won’t. This is due to the fact that Google’s geocoding service data is incomplete for South Africa. Another thing you need to remember when searching for streets - Lynnwood, for example, is a suburb of Pretoria, but Lynnwood is also the name of a road in Pretoria. If you search for only Lynnwood, you get no results. If you search for Lynnwood Pretoria, you’ll get the suburb. If you search for Lynnwood Road, you’ll get the street - In fact you’ll get a few, because there is also a Lynnwood Road in Durbanville, Kloof and Germiston.

Search Plaks

This is a very simple search. It works in pretty much the same way as Search Locations works, but it searches places of interest listed on Plak, with this very important limitation - It only searches the titles of places of interest that start with the supplied criteria.

For example, if you search for 1, the results returned will only be for places of interest that have titles that start with 1.

Search

This search functionality is accessed by clicking the Search button, which should be on every page of the Plak site. This search allows slightly more comprehensive searching, as the search will return results for places of interest that contain the search criteria in either their title or description.

This search also allows search results to be filtered by type. i.e. If you are only interested in finding places of interest that relate to entertainment, select Entertainment from the Plak Type dropdown before executing your search.

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