Hi guys,
I am trying to understand why Nominatim return so many results with places not even close to matching the search “dorf Korkwitz” in Germany.
Example 1: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?format=xml&q=dorf%20Korkwitz&countrycodes=DE
If I however, remove “Dorf”, I get the expected result:
Example 2: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?format=xml&q=Korkwitz&countrycodes=DE
Can someone take a look? Am I or Nominatim doing something wrong in example 1?
Thanks
According to Wikipedia the name of that village is only “Körkwitz” (without “Dorf”), therefore that’s how it’s in the OSM-Data and how Nominatim expects you to call it. So the question is: Why did you add “Dorf” in your first example?
P.S.: Since your example is in germany: There are more users in the German section of this forum 
For Non-Germans: “Dorf” simply means “village”
Thanks for your reply. I was using dorf prefix as well since someone have added it to alternate name for the village in geonames.org:
http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=Korkwitz&country=
I still do not understand how Nominatim logic works though. How come Nominatim return “Ostseebad Dierhagen, Darß/Fischland, Landkreis Vorpommern-Rügen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany”
There is neither “Dorf” or “Korkwitz” present in the display name.
PS, I’m not German, so I’ll stay here 
Personally, I do not have any interest in Korkwitz. But I am interested in knowing why Nominatim returns results not even close to what was asked for.
Example 1:
http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?format=xml&q=dorf%20Korkwitz&countrycodes=DE
In that result set you will see amongst others:
“Ostseebad Dierhagen, Darß/Fischland, Landkreis Vorpommern-Rügen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany”
Any idea?
Surprisingly yes: Nominatim seems to know that “Dorf” means “village” and looks for villages near Körkwitz, and returns them sorted by only Nominatim knows what (since their “priority” is the same; apparently not distance). That’s only a guess, but it would fit to the result 