Search is possibly returning over-simplified geometries

[stdavis]

A user pointed out this geometry shape as returned from the web api and how different it is from the source data:

Here's a reproduction of the issue: https://codepen.io/stdavis/pen/yyYxqEG?editors=1000

It appears that the web api runs st_simplify on the geometry of features before it returns them to the client. I wonder if 10 meters is too large? Perhaps it should be dropped to 1 or less? I'm not sure what other use cases went into the decision to simplify.

My vote would be to remove simplification. As a user, I would expect to get the exact same geometry as the source data.

[steveoh]

This is by design since the search endpoint was created for zooming to extents on a map. Large geometry payloads increase our cloud spend and slow down the API. It was also popular when we didn't have a complete ArcGIS Online SGID facet.

I'd prefer to deprecate these endpoints because ArcGIS Online is more complete with the SGID and more feature rich than what is currently offered through the search endpoints. The open sgid requirement for searching via the API makes it much less attractive as a solution.

[stdavis]

I support deprecation in favor of AGOL services. In the meantime, perhaps the docs for search should be updated to reflect these limitations with geometries?