Sort locations by distance away (fuzzily)

Guys,

When I use Nominatim, this doesn't appear to be an issue. Can anyone confirm whether it still causes problems for them, or whether it has been solved?

Thanks,

Chris.

As Nominatim is now the default search tool, I am going to close this. If we experience further issues, it can be re-opened.

Chris.

Chris,
Have you closed it because the nominatim returns always the POIs sorted in the order of the distance away?
droidguy

droidguy wrote:
> Chris,
> Have you closed it because the nominatim returns always the POIs sorted in the order of the distance away?
> droidguy

Hi, droidguy.

Yes. How do you feel about that?

Chris.

I think it's dumb to close this bug as it's still a problem! Just because nominatum has the bug doesn't mean we can stop tracking it here.

kizza wrote:
> I think it's dumb

Sorry!

Chris and Kizza,
See this. When I search for the church near my house using text "saint clare church" on OSM map search, I get the correct single result. When I search for the same, using the same text from OSN Directions, I get 4 or 5 results and the right result is the last one.

Is it confirmed to be an OSM error? Even if yes, can we do something in OSN to workaround it?

droidguy

A perfect search ranking should weigh the following 3 factors:
* Matches what the user typed even if it's not perfect
* Distance away from the user
* Relative importance of the place (a large city should appear higher in the results than a street)

OSM Namefinder behaves differently depending on if you give it a 'near' clause. If you leave it out it uses a combination of relevance and place importance, if you put it in it will only look at distance away. In OpenSatNav the POI search uses the near clause but the text based one doesn't.

For Nominatum if we tell it we are near a place it will only return results within a certain radius which is limiting if you do intend to make a long trip. I haven't looked at the code so I don't know the actual distance. Here's the bug I logged about Nominatum:
http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/2519

Thanks for explaining, Kieran; I didn't realize that.

Chris.

Does anyone know what we need to do next with this issue?

Chris.

I guess, we just need to implement a resorting of the results obtained from nominatim. Kieran, how would you suggest to combine the 3 criteria you suggest to apply?

I made the following change a while ago:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kieran-fleming/opensatnav/release-1.0/revision/142

My 'perfect' matching idea really has to run on the server because we don't have enough information to work from. Specifying a search radius to Nominatum avoids the embarrassing results that are 1000's of kms away. I think this is good enough until Nominatum improves so I'm happy to mark this as fixed.

I would like some feedback on this, please give the testing apk a go and let me know.

I'm taking the 1.0 milestone off as this has been reported upstream and we'll have to wait for them