This doesn't make much sense to me, and I'm hoping someone can shed some light on what's going on here and how I work around it.
If I query like this:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?ll=37.77%2C-122.41&radius=15000&intent=browse&oauth_token=xxx&limit=20&query=pi%20ba
I get a list of about 15 items, including the item I'm searching for (pi bar). However, if I search for the exact match name:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?ll=37.77%2C-122.41&radius=15000&intent=browse&oauth_token=xxx&limit=20&query=pi%20bar
I just get back the blanket list of venues within this area (mostly BART stops, etc.)
Is it expected that I should have to shave the last character off of user entered queries to get results back, or is this just a messed up venue name that I've been debugging with?
I'm not sure if this may help, but I've discovered placing an "and" between words in your query can produce more accurate results:
Searching for Chili's Bar & Grill
The first query has extraneous results:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?ll=34.07527923583984,-84.29469299316406&radius=5000&query=chili's bar grill&oauth_token=xxx&v=20111205
The second is much more accurate (although I've removed the ampersand: &)
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?ll=34.07527923583984,-84.29469299316406&radius=5000&query=chili's and bar and grill&oauth_token=xxx&v=20111205
There's a known issue with quality of bigram matches in foursquare venue searches -- your query term includes a very popular word ("bar") which skews the results. The search team is working on quality improvements for these sorts of queries.
