Hi team,
For context:
France is divided in what we call “departements”, which are specific areas in the country numbered 01 to 95. Our postal codes are 5 numbers, and the first 2 are always the departement in which we’re located (e.g.: My postal code is 13006, it means I’m in the departement 13, called “Bouches-du-Rhône”). When French people travel around or looking for things to do in another city, they will usually know the 2 digits number of the departement they are going to but rarely the full postal code.
Issue:
Something that I’ve been seeing quite a lot across French Answers experiences that include location entities is users looking for locations in a departement by simply typing the 2 digits number of the departement (like “13”, or “78” for example, without the full postal code, leading to no results, even when there are actually locations in this departement, because our algorithm doesn’t understand this is a location/address search).
Solution proposed:
A very easy way to fix this would be to, in our interpretation of the query, append “000” to the query when the string of the query contains or is equal to 2 numbers from 01 to 95, as this would make them complete postal codes for the departement and would surface accurate results.
Behaviour now : Search for 78 > Not considered address search > No results
Behaviour then: Search for 78 > Interpreted as 78000 > Results in that departement
Let me know if this could be implemented or if there is already a workaround in place that could help sove this issue. Thanks a lot!
Best,
-Quentin