I wonder if there are Chinese cities with names close to major world cities. Paris has 2.15m people, its metropolitan area has 12.x million. A medium sized city im China has more than that. If by coincidence it's also named Paris, getting that as the search result would be annoying.
Oh, I absolutely agree. But I can see how that might have come in as a first-assumption that was never revised. Which, if you think about it, is probably a huge class of bugs industry-wide.
To approximate what a human would do, one would presumably want to start by ranking places on a range of dimensions:
* nearest
* biggest (or maybe size category: big city, city, town, village)
* how many times user has asked about this place before
* how recently user last asked about this place
* ...
If most/all these rankings put the same place in the top spot, go for it! Otherwise, ask the user for clarification.