When I enter a county like Onondaga County into the YQL console, it definitely finds it and returns a county level result. However, when I enter the same text in a location field in CSO, the result shown is New York United States. I confirmed the same problem exists with Cook County, IL displaying as Illinois United States. From a user perspective, it looks to me like it has replaced my desired location with the entire state - even though as a developer I suspect it is using the correct bounding box with an incorrect label.
Further testing shows that colloquial regions like Bay Area also get displayed as the generic California United States
I suggest displaying the values of the name and placeTypeName tags when they don't repeat what is already shown. Then the results would come up Onondaga (County), Cook (County), and San Francisco Bay Area (Colloquial), confirming to the user that you are using the region they typed, even when the type is not one you planned for.
It would be really nice to display a little Google Map that shows the actual bounding box being used.
Considering the target user group are techies, just showing the actual bounding box coordinates might be useful too, or having a link to get KML for the entire set of locations listed.
P.S. All YQL queries were entered as select * from geo.places where text="text shown"
