Does it just use "here" / viewing box as a bias, not a hard cutoff? Personally I definitely expect "here" to mean "absolutely no results outside my window under any circumstances" (with some room for fuzziness with different screen aspect ratios, though even then I expect fewer results, not more). I'm not familiar with what Photon does tho, and it's not particularly clear from a quick skim of the site/readme.
For some reasons, the results drawn on the map are more numerous than the ones we show in the result list. I've raised an issue to investigate this. https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2480
> But if that category search is not enabled, why doesn't it find business name matches? And why are the results far outside the viewing window?
Good question. It's a Photon (our search API) problem as far as I know. We probably did set a local search ponderation too low for this use case.
In case the user chose the (default) "search here" option, we could also add a proximity ranking.
I do agree with your last big paragraph : we don't have Google's budget, hence the "search here" option which already solved lots of dead ends. Thanks a lot for this discussion !