Hi all, This is my first message to the list so I take the opportunity to say hello to all and thanks to the community for the awesome software, data, and organisation.
Now to the point. At the ES comunity, we've been discussing how difficult is to obtain useful results from OSM. Too many times results are odd or surprising: ordering puts better results down, sometimes it misses obvious matches entirely... Specifically, we are referring about the search engine of OSM front page, and other Nominatim bsaed services. After some anaysis, issues seem related to: - stop words usage (prepositions, articles...) - result scoring and ordering (a perfect match placed below far and unrelated results) - word matching when there are tildes or non-unicode chars - synonyms / ignoring for some categories and common nouns (street / road...) - lack of autocompletion (helps users finding a result when they don't quite know the exact term) - lack of cross-langugae search (eg. in regions with several official languages, people mixes street names and road types between languages) - support for typo errors Part of the problem is that every language requires particular considerations, which impacts most of the points above. So in my view, a suitable solution would need to have good i18n support bottom up. We think that other communities (language-wise) may be hitting the same issues according to Github issues. I list some references at the bottom, but they don't seem to get much attention. Ultimately, the technology stack Nominatim is built upon is not state of the art. I have done a quick test with Elasticsearch and a simple default installation with naive data loading already produces decent results. I later found that alternative search engines exist, for example "Pelias", which are implemented on top of newer technologies, and their demo seems to work fine... Has any alternative to the current geocoder been tested? What would it take for this to be improved? If alternatives exist, can the search engine at the front page be changed? or provide options so users can choose their preferred search engine? maybe even from specialized local/themed search providers? Perhaps something like that would pave the way for alternative search software and services, and foster innovation. Cheers! Refs: - https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/issues/1811 - https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/issues/333 - https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/issues/1208 - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Search_engines - source code of my tests: https://github.com/jjmontesl/cubetl/tree/master/examples/osm Jose Juan Montes
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