There are more than ten thousand events altogether in the Visit London What's On database. Using a special online search form, it's supposed to be possible to refine this list to select only events meeting certain criteria. As we discovered yesterday, searching by date is bloody useless. But several other database searches are even worse...
1) You searched for all events with car parking for 10 Feb 2007 onwards. We're sorry, but there are no results for your search.
2) You searched for all events with wheelchair access for 10 Feb 2007 onwards. We're sorry, but there are no results for your search.
3) You searched for all events with a hearing loop for 10 Feb 2007 onwards. We're sorry, but there are no results for your search.
So, according to the Visit London website, not one single event in our capital city is accessible to the physically disabled or the hearing impaired. This is clearly untrue. The search engine has been set up to search for these categories, but NOT ONE event has been tagged as accessible. If I were one of Visit London's paying advertisers operating a disabled-friendly venue, I'd be livid.
5) You searched for all free events for 10 Feb 2007 onwards. We're sorry, but there are no results for your search.
And again. Thousands of the ten thousand events in the Visit London database charge nothing for entry, but NOT ONE has been tagged as 'free'. So if you search for free events, not one shows up. This is gobsmackingly lazy programming and website design.
6) How about searching by location? Still not great. You can't search for events within a certain radius of somewhere - it's all or nothing. If the location you enter doesn't appear in the event's address, Visit London won't find it. Ask for events in E3, for example, and you get 40... but ask for events in Bow and you get nothing. It's all a bit old school.
8) At the other end of the scale, several events in the database are listed ridiculously far into the future. The Elmbridge Museum in Weybridge is launching a special Olympics exhibition on 16 February next year. Book now for next year's Lord Mayor's Firework Display on 9 November 2008 (quick, before your diary fills up). The late night Ceremony of Keys at the Tower of London apparently continues until 31 December 2010 (but not beyond, for some reason). Most forward-looking of all, we're told that Brazilian musician Seu Jorge is playing the Roundhouse in Camden on 12 November 2012. That's got to be data-entry incompetence, surely? On the Visit London website, it almost certainly is.
