The Search Jaunt

In case you didn’t notice it. Groundspeak made some changes concerning Pocket Queries.

In order to achieve that (and some other additions concerning the 10 years events) there was some miscommunicated outage of the servers. Apart from that, we got something one calls the PQ1K feature or pocket queries with 1000 caches in plain English. The first reflex when it was announced (a while ago) was a sense of thrill. Finally, we don’t need as much PQs and nor the need to spread them over the week. But when we look how things are implemented, we see that there is a catch:

• PQs containing 501-1000 caches are only available as download, PQs containing less will still be e-mailed
• My Finds PQs are no longer e-mailed

What looks as a promising upgraded is in fact a kind of downgrade – even for the people how leave their PQs as is – since the My Finds PQ is no longer e-mailed. One states in the announcement that the dedicated PQ generator has/had already a heavy load – you know my opinion about that – and increasing the limit was only possible by cutting the generation time by half, which one seemed to be able to accomplish.

If that’s a fact, why does one make a difference between the old (smaller) PQs and the PQ1K or – even worse – cut the My Finds PQ e-mails? Being in the business for a while, I don’t get the underlying (technical) reason for this:

• since the PQ generation time/load  seems to be cut in half, it shouldn’t make any difference if one have 1000 caches in a PQ now.
• one doesn’t save any bandwith or data volume (if Groudspeak is billed by volume) with it since makes the PQs available for a whole week. The result is that the user can download it as much as one pleases, which puts as such more stress on the bandwith than simply sending an e-mail where the ‘burden’ lies at the cachers side
• one needs to provide more – read a lot – of disk space  for all the PQs holding a total of 25000 caches so that’s no gain either

Honestly, I don’t see what the benefit would be for Groundspeak nor for their customers by making PQs downloadable. By doing this, one provides less service for the paying customers. It gives them more work in order to import them e.g. in GSAK, where one could import via e-mail. That’s gone now, even if you stick to PQ0.5K since the My Finds PQs – which still can’t be triggered automatically – aren’t sent anymore via e-mail. Sure, one announces that one is looking with GSAK in order to make imports possible again, but isn’t that something one should consider in advance? Now, one is confronting people with a fait accompli and rely on the volunteership of others to solve the problem. A missed chance to give people something without an unpleasant aftertaste.

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