Suggest API ignores exact address match if location is too far away

[DanielDormont]

Hi, in my application I am exposing an autocomplete box that uses the Suggest API to, well, make suggestions. To improve accuracy, I am passing the "location" parameter based on the user's current location or the bounds of the map they may be looking at, at the moment. I'm having some trouble in the situation where the term they're  entering, no matter how precise, is not near that location. For example, take this address:

4 Newburgh St, Carnaby, London, UK 

If I search that location alone: https://geocode.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/World/GeocodeServer/suggest?f=json&text=4+Newburgh+S... the correct address appears as the first result. But if I call it with a location: https://geocode.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/World/GeocodeServer/suggest?f=json&text=4+Newburgh+S... then the results don't even contain the correct address.

Is there a better way of using auto-suggest that handles potentially worldwide locations?

Thanks,Dan

[DanielDormont]

Thinking about this more, this seems like a bug in the Suggest API to me. If the address I submit is an exact match for a particular real world location, that should appear first in the results even if it's far away from the location that I pass in the location parameter. Hoping this gets some visibility from the Esri API team.

[DanielDormont]

Another curious thing is that I get a slightly different set of results using geocode-api.arcgis.com instead of geococde.arcgis.com, but the actual address I'm looking for is still not there.

[DanielDormont · Accepted solution]

Well, I think I figured it out eventually. The issue really seems to be that that in the geocoder's database, this particular location is not connected to any place called "Carnaby". 

https://geocode.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/World/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates?f=json&api...

I'm not sure where my user got this search string from, perhaps Google or another provider, but I guess it's not that surprising that the result doesn't show up.