The reverse search function is extremely useful for locating members who may be interested in an exchange. However, it appears that it only works at a country or city level. In other words, it will identify members who wish to visit your city or country, but will not identify members who want to visit a geographic region defined only by a state or province levelā¦ for example: California, New York, Ontario, British Columbia, etc. This is a big problem for those of us (like me) who live in a rural area of a Canadian province (New Brunswick). I would like to search for members interested in visiting New Brunswick, but cannot because it wonāt locate anybody at that level, even if they have listed āNew Brunswickā as one of their preferred destinations. I have reported this flaw to the Home Exchange support team several times over the past two years and have been told that itās being worked-on, but so far no correction has been implemented.
Iām curious how many other members would find this to be a useful improvement?
Hi Bob!
Thank you so much for bringing this up! We agree and think that the reverse search function can be a really powerful tool for finding reciprocal exchanges but know that, thanks to your feedback and that of other members, that there is still lots that we can improve on with it. Our data engineerās actually looking into the subject at the moment so Iām hoping weāll see improvements soon
Interesting point Bob, I had not really noticed.
I often search the state of āMaineā, for example, and it works very well (it also gives me St Andrews and Fredericton in NB, which I like :-), and Portsmouth NH).
I suspect the search areas are built up somewhat āorganicallyā by the accumulation of what people enter, both as their home location and as their preferred destination. It seems to be a form of AI or user-driven content. You can see this when you start typing a destination and multiple variants pop up in the scroll down menu (I often wonder if I need to search all the name variations to get all of the search results, as not all members entered it the same way?)
I suspect what we are up against is that, internationally, the regions of Canada are not well known, so the system is not being āfedā a lot of useful place names. I have seen New Brunswick as a preferred destination a number of times, or Atlantic Canada (ditto for PEI and NS). Too many members internationally enter āCanadaā as a preferred destination and I just have to laugh, that is akin to entering Europe!! Mind you, many Europeans write āUSAā as well, not a very clear holiday goal!
If something can be done to āclean upā the scroll down menus, or to populate them ātop-downā with real region/province names, that would be great!
Actually, I have found that reverse-search works in the way you describe on the mobile phone version of the app. However, the computer browser version of the app does not work at all! It returns completely false information (i.e. members who have not listed New Brunswick at all).
And the problem with the way the mobile version works is that it returns too much informationā¦ i.e. it returns not only the members who wish to visit the destination I specified (New Brunswick, Canada), but it also displays the members who wish to visit geographically neighboring areas (Maine, Nova Scotia, Quebec, etc). This means that I have to scroll through literally 600-700 listings before finding the approximately 50-60 who have listed New Brunswick specifically as their preferred destination. I donāt view this as an advantage, I view it as a flaw.
The best of all functionality would be if the search function worked in such a way as the user could specify a SPECIFIC LOCATION and a DISTANCE. Then, the search function would search for all targets that are within the specified DISTANCE from the specified LOCATION. This is a feature which is available on all modern GIS (Geographic Information System) software packages. The fact that it doesnāt exist on the Home Exchange app implies that either the HE platform is using a very old primitive GIS or it has a very limited geographic/address database.
And obviously, the function should work equally well on both the PC browser and mobile phone versions. Right now, it only works partially on the mobile phone app, and not at all on the PC browser.
False.
State and province level in Canada and the USA are available in every conceivable useful map database, as are postal codes. Major administrative regions are available for Europe also in any functional Map database. If entities as significant as the state of California or the province of Ontario are not available in the HE reverse-search map database, then it is a significant failure.
Also, if what you say is true, why does searching by administrative district work for a search, but does not work for a reverse-search? If it works for a search, it means that some of the functionality and map database of the platform is accessing geographic data on the basis of administrative district.
ādepend on the Map providers, which is not HE but a different companyā
Why are you giving this as a reason for the flaws in the reverse-search function? Almost every company in existence purchases tools from software and data vendors. Did the HE development team invent their own computer language? Did they build by hand their own computers? No. They purchased the software building blocks to create the platform. There is no reason that HE could not purchase a map database that includes North American and Europe administrative districts.
!! This seems like an easy fix!!!
). But for what I understood from the staff, yes there are a lot of bugs on this, and some of those bugs Come from the Map links with the site or apps ( in fact there are several Map providers cause itās not the same Map on the web and on the apps). My answer was just to explain that itās apparently not that simple to correct as asked thĆ© previous comment. But the tech staff is apparently working on it,so letās Hope it will be better in the next future