I am zoomed in to Chicago: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/41.8450/-88.2559
I search for: windmill
First search results are in England and Ireland.
The results seem to be sorted by key instead of proximity.
Would it be possible to change search to prefer current view, and allow to request extended search?
Search for: “Neil’s Gallery” jumps to UK.
Full name search jumps to correct result.
Would it be possible to support partial name search?
Help link on main page kind of jumps into deep end of OSM. Could we have a link to a section on searching, including what’s supported, what not, what are OpenStreetMap Nominatim and GeoNames, and when they should be used.
While Nominatim (the search engine behind osm.org) has a possibility to search locally, I don’t know whether this is enabled from the osm.org site. I have read different opinions about that.
In case the request from osm.org to Nominatim is not made with with flag, Nominatim takes other properties into account to come to a solution. Field such as Wikidata, Wikimedia or website URLs help to increase the weight of a result
Another problem is of course that you added the name of the gallery in the operator field. This might have caused the “buggy” search.
When I search for “windmill in aartselaar” I get a result. “windmill in Chicago” does not return a result at all.
Perhaps there are no windmills mapped in Chicago, perhaps they are not mapped properly. Do you have an example of a windmill you want to see in the result ?
Nominatim is a separate service that is integrated in the osm.org website. You can access it directly at http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ There you find (rather technical) documentation as well.
I have to click “More Results” 8 times before getting: “Shop Hills Creek, Glades Road, Gatlinburg, Sevier County, Tennessee, 37738, United States of America”
@Escada, thank you very much for digging it out. It took me an hour and couple coffee refills to get through that internet democracy in action…
My summary of that thread:
Developers are working on other priorities and also have other considerations how search results should be prioritized (extra weight for wikipedia, wikidata links).
Search can used for both for geographic places and POI and some of the requirements conflict comes from that.