Comment 8 for bug 579374

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