[OSM-dev] Name finder for the main OSM page?

[David Earl]

A separate idea from the search but related to it:

When you're zoomed in you often lose the context of where you are. We 
could have a "Where am I" button. This would consult the name finder 
with the query "places near <lat>,<lon>" where <lat>,<lon> comes from 
the current map centre, and show the results in a panel like the search 
panel (linked in the same way).

You'd need to filter the results to show only those with non-zero rank 
(to exclude results like "Ingham Place" matching the word place), so 
you'd get a list like
    1km west of Teversham
    4km east if Cambridge
    24km south of Ely
    ...

I guess this would be fairly easy given the current Search, but a really 
nice variation would be a little diagram with the direction and distance 
from the centre being related to the places found. They'd have to be 
filtered down to 5 or 6 results and I don't think just the nearest ones 
are most helpful - a more distant city may be better context than a lot 
of nearby hamlets. So we could weight the selection - say 
rank^2/distance (rank in the name finder results is the kind of place - 
hamlet is 10 up to city which is 50).

BTW, ***please*** don't do this simply on change of map position, 
otherwise my server provider will get very upset!

David