France is not within 30 miles of London [closed]

Question

On Stack Overflow Careers, I regularly do a search for candidates within 30 miles of London. I often get matches with candidates who have listed that they want to work in France, and expressly not listed London, England, Europe, or Earth (any of which would legitimately match the search). Please tell the Stack Overflow server that France is close by, but not within 30 miles, so it shouldn't show up in my searches.

Update: For an example of the search in question, I entered no keywords at all and just the single criterion "within 30 miles of London, England". Among other results, I got the candidate with ID 16102, whose list of desired workplaces includes France but no other European location.

Answer 1

Careers version 1 is using a free service for geolocation that is provided by yahoo via YQL which gives us a rough bounding box data for the geography that we use for search. There will be cases such as this one where more results will be returned for a given search area.

You can try this yourself:

• London
  http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20geo.places%20where%20text%3D%22London%22&diagnostics=true

  <boundingBox>
      <southWest>
          <latitude>51.261318</latitude>
          <longitude>-0.563000</longitude>
      </southWest>
      <northEast>
          <latitude>51.686031</latitude>
          <longitude>0.280360</longitude>
      </northEast>
  </boundingBox>
  

• France
  http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20geo.places%20where%20text%3D%22France%22&diagnostics=true

  <boundingBox>
      <southWest>
          <latitude>41.333740</latitude>
          <longitude>-5.140600</longitude>
      </southWest>
      <northEast>
          <latitude>51.089062</latitude>
          <longitude>9.559320</longitude>
      </northEast>
  </boundingBox>
  

These bounding boxes intersect as shown below (yellow box = London - green box = France):

Version 2.0 of careers will include more precise matching and will further enhance the geography data we use for search.

Answer 2

This confusion is almost certainly caused by one poet's account of a specific vantage point from which he could see both London and France.

I don't remember the specific location in question, but in one of the author's other works, he devotes a number of lines to a similar sounding locale in close proximity to a "hole in the wall" from which he made numerous observations.

That said, absent other evidence, I'd be concerned that his credibility as a source/cartographer is somewhat compromised by his interest in observing underpants.

Answer 3

Perhaps the API was written during the reign of Henry V, as Chorus pointed out at the conclusion of Shakespeare's docu-soap on that king it wasn't until the reign of his son that the two kingdoms were parted:

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursued the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.
Small time, but in that small most greatly lived
This star of England: Fortune made his sword;
By which the world's best Unicorn achieved,
And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed:
Which oft our stage hath shown; and, for their sake,
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.

Answer 4

Looks like the nearest point of France and the very edge of what might still be considered London are still 83 miles apart.

I understand they use a Yahoo mapping API for this, but I don't ever fiddle with it. Perhaps someone with experience with it can find out if this is an SO problem or Yahoo issue.