Distance - Countries, which begin with entered letter are displayed next to suggested places

[kbecciv]

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Version Number: 1.4.21-4
Reproducible in staging?: y
Reproducible in production?: n
If this was caught during regression testing, add the test name, ID and link from TestRail:
Email or phone of affected tester (no customers):
Logs: https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/4856
Expensify/Expensify Issue URL:
Issue reported by: Applause - Internal Team
Slack conversation:

Issue found when executing PR #33887

Action Performed:

1. Go to URL https://staging.new.expensify.com/
2. Login with any account
3. Create a workspace and go to your workspace expense chat
4. Create a distance request and allow the browser to give your location
5. Type an a in the first waypoint and confirm that the locations offered are biased by your real location

Expected Result:

The locations offered are biased by your real location

Actual Result:

When the location is turned on, along with the locations offered depending on your real location, countries whose names begin with the entered letter are displayed next

Workaround:

Unknown

Platforms:

Which of our officially supported platforms is this issue occurring on?

• Android: Native
• Android: mWeb Chrome
• iOS: Native
• iOS: mWeb Safari
• MacOS: Chrome / Safari
• MacOS: Desktop

Screenshots/Videos

Add any screenshot/video evidence

Bug6332062_1704367872635.bandicam_2024-01-04_10-01-33-992.mp4

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[github-actions]

👋 Friendly reminder that deploy blockers are time-sensitive ⏱ issues! Check out the open `StagingDeployCash` deploy checklist to see the list of PRs included in this release, then work quickly to do one of the following:

1. Identify the pull request that introduced this issue and revert it.
2. Find someone who can quickly fix the issue.
3. Fix the issue yourself.

[melvin-bot]

Triggered auto assignment to @youssef-lr (Engineering), see https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/4319 for more details.

[paultsimura]

Proposal

Please re-state the problem that we are trying to solve in this issue.

What is the root cause of that problem?

The location bias of Google Places search is not strictly limiting the results to fit into the predefined location bias: https://stackoverflow.com/a/59850360

It seems like the countries have a high rank in Google places search results, therefore they are returned in the search results even though they are not within the provided boundaries.

What changes do you think we should make in order to solve the problem?

I would suggest not showing countries in the search results at all, since the distance requests are expensable by mileage, and "trip from Poland to the USA" is a very unclear distance.

For this, we can filter out the search results with type: country here:

App/src/components/AddressSearch/index.js

Lines 442 to 451 in a2fc252

	renderRow={(data) => {
	const title = data.isPredefinedPlace ? data.name : data.structured_formatting.main_text;
	const subtitle = data.isPredefinedPlace ? data.description : data.structured_formatting.secondary_text;
	return (
	<View>
	{title && <Text style={[styles.googleSearchText]}>{title}</Text>}
	<Text style={[styles.textLabelSupporting]}>{subtitle}</Text>
	</View>
	);
	}}

What alternative solutions did you explore? (Optional)

We can also leverage the Google Places' query.types parameter, which allows limiting search results to specific types of points, but it will require us to decide which specific types we want to use for Distance requests. Here are the example values: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/web-service/supported_types

[youssef-lr]

cc @aldo-expensify could this be related to your PR? Regardless, what do you think about the proposal above removing countries from the suggestions all together?

[allroundexperts]

cc @rojiphil Since you authored this feature and might have a better idea on how to fix!

[youssef-lr]

Yeah I'm not sure about hiding countries to be honest, it sounds like we would be fixing a symptom instead of the actual problem. Because this isn't happening in production according to @kbecciv.

[allroundexperts]

The feature as a whole is not yet on staging. This was the original PR.

[paultsimura]

Because this isn't happening in production

It is actually, but in Prod the results are currently not location-biased at all, so it isn't noticeable that much (e.g. India, Israel, UK here):