[OSM-dev] Namefinder - what to do

[Nick Black]

Hello,

I've done some quick analysis on the namefinder logs from David, for
the period  28/Oct/2007 - 21/Jan/2008.  This ignores any requests that
don't come from 128.40.58.202.  A complex query is more than one word
(eg pubs+in+putney) and where am I is a reverse geocoding (pubs near
51.12 0.15)

total is 113017
complex total is 64666
where am i is 39792
complex minus where am i is 24874

Proportion of queries that are complex is 57.2179406637939 %
Proportion of queries that are complex and not where am i is 22.0090782802587 %

So only 22% of queries coming from OSM have more than one term in
them.  Of these, only a tiny amount ask for a feature like a post
office or a pub and actually use the namefinder's abilities.

Because of the size of planet, it takes 5 days to create a namefinder
index - I had planned to bring the namefinder code into the rails
codebase, but the whole thing needs to be made to run off diffs to
make it feasible.

If we create an index on the way_tags k & v column we can directly
search live data and retain the vast majority of the functionality of
the namefinder search.  This obviously leaves the nodes being
unsearchable.  So I'm going to look at moving node tags into a
node_tags table.

TomH: what do you think about creating a full text index on  way_tags k & v?

Cheers,

-- 
Nick Black
--------------------------------
http://www.blacksworld.net