Usability: Find "Generator hostel" in London

I had to do this yesterday on mobile. The main problem was not seeing the result I wanted, then seeing “More results” put me off scrolling down any further (I thought I’d reached the end of the results). Actually I’d only reached the end of a set of results, and the result I wanted was under Geonames. It would have helped if the Geonames results were first, because I typed a name, not an address, and, within those results, if the United Kingdom result was first, because that’s where I was.

Hallo William,

Thanks for trying out openstreetmap.org and welcome to the community.As you might know most data in osm is collected by volunteers. That might explain why the hostel you are looking for is missing.

The best thing you can do, is edit the map and add Generator Hostel in Londen. Pretty sure it will pop up at the top after that.

The map on osm.org is in the first place a site where mappers can verify their work. Mappers are not involved in Geonames, that’s why those results are at the bottom (IMHO).

This use-case calls for the nearest (London) results to be first, whether they’re Geonames or OSM Nominatim.

When it comes to getting at OSM data, on mobile you’ve got a number of choices (including various apps - OsmAnd, MAPS.ME and others), and the OSM website itself is almost the last thing that I’d consider using. It does work there, but it’s a bit like a dog walking on its hind legs (impressive that it happens at all, but not particularly functional).

Incidentally, a search for “generator hostel london” works just fine for me: http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4231455392 . Perhaps you left off the “London” part expecting that Nominatim (the search software on OSM.org) would search locally first?

Another thing worth mentioning is that it’s unlikely that many OSM developers will read this forum. Most of the development chat happens over on github (in this case https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website and https://github.com/twain47/Nominatim/ are the repositories for osm.org and Nominatim respectively), and there’s also the “dev” mailing list and #osm-dev IRC channel.

Thanks for pointing me to the right places. Perhaps my first development step will be to work out why I didn’t find those myself!

Yes, I think I left off “London” from the search. I switched to Google Maps after that so perhaps there’s my second contribution.

It’s sad that the most open and accessible form of OSM data isn’t up to par, but that’s something I’ll be happy to work on. I’m not a big fan of downloading apps is all.

Mobile friendly search:
https://searchosm.com/?search=generator&cat=lodging&north=51.5792&south=51.44245&west=-0.23861&east=0.00378