Geonames location search results aren't accurate enough

Binary package hint: indicator-datetime

I had some problems with indicator-datetime. As I have played with it more, it seems to work better (I have managed to get it to work for me despite the issues I had when reporting this). I'm not sure how reproducible all of these problems are as it doesn't necessarily break consistently....

Click "Time in other locations" and click "Choose Locations"
Say, we have a friend who lives in the San Francisco area which has over 7 million people and we want to know what time it is there.
I get all sorts of not-working results.
Typing "San" shows a bunch of results, typing "San " with a space takes a long time to think and shows 3 results!, and typing "San F" shows lots of results the first few times I tried but now sorta-correctly only displays "San Francisco de Quito, Equador". Note that this Equador San Francisco was not shown with "San "; in fact there are obviously far more "San " cities than just 3.

Searching for "California" is even crazier. Apparently, there's a California in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Kentucky. (California in Maryland by the way has 9000 people.) Near the bottom of the list is "San Francisco de California" in Peru. Why did this not show up when we searched for "San F"?

Somehow, somebody wanting the US Pacific timezone is supposed to know that "Los Angeles" is the correct answer.

I also tried adding the country of "Bahrain" since I lived there for a few years. No results, but if I search for Manama I get some (not printed pretty but it works). Note that searching for Manam doesn't give the appropriate results either.

For a brief time, I got the dialog to give me the list of San Franciscos, proving that it has actually heard of the city in California. But now, I'm getting what looks like a short list of time zones (starting with Abidjan, Accra, Addis Ababa), so it's broken again.

To summarize, the geonames data as implemented by indicator-datetime looks like too much data to me (results aren't weighted very well) & the search results are extremely inconsistent. I guess the thing works eventually but too often I can't get it to work at all. This applies to the map used for the primary timezone and maybe even the map used in Maverick or Natty's ubiquity.

I suggest replacing this confusing, broken dialog with either a world map if it works (the timezone map used in Lucid's Ubiquity worked well) or maybe even a dropdown list by country, then city.

ProblemType: BugDistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: indicator-datetime 0.2.3-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Apr 22 15:00:22 2011InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_GB.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bashSourcePackage: indicator-datetimeUpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-01-01 (111 days ago)