How does Dopplr know which city you mean when you type in your
destination? It looks up the name in a database, and tries to find a
match. We have information on over 150,000 world cities but several
travellers have asked for better coverage. So we've been doing some work
behind the scenes to improve it.

It's difficult to get the location right every time, for lots of
reasons; partly because the same place name might be spelt differently
in different languages; partly because there are many places that share
the same name.

We call our database "the gazetteer". We've been adding new technology
to make it work smarter, including data from a free service called
Geonames:

http://www.geonames.org/about.html

Our aim is to add all the cities Geonames knows to our gazetteer. We're
adding 100,000 new cities every day, and will keep doing so until we've
got information on 2.4 million places around the globe.

We're also including destinations that aren't cities - things like
islands, national parks, and ski resorts. So in future, Dopplr is more
likely to recognise names of places you're travelling to.

We've made other changes to the gazetteer too, tweaks to the way it
guesses which destination you mean when lots of locations share the same
name.

This smarter, faster gazetteer will hopefully make Dopplr easier to use.
Please contact us if you have any questions about it. And keep an eye on
our blog at http://blog.dopplr.com for more updates on this topic.

Wishing you safe travels, The Dopplr Team.