[OSM-dev] Namefinder - what to do

[David Earl]

On 22/01/2008 18:03, Tom Hughes wrote:
> In message <fn59u3$a3m$1 at ger.gmane.org>
>           Gervase Markham <gerv-gmane at gerv.net> wrote:
> 
>> Will this have the effect of speeding up NameFinder? I find it takes on
>> average 30 seconds to return results. Given that we don't have
>> comprehensive postcode lookup, it's really important that
>> www.openstreetmap.org has a box where you can paste an address and have
>> the map take you, quickly, to roughly the right place.
> 
> The author of NameFinder is working on resolving the current performance
> problems I believe, but yes, Nick's work may give us an alternate search
> mechanism to hook into on the site.

Indeed. Though my first need is to reduce the time to generate the 
index. I'm aware that it has got considerably slower as the index size 
has increased so dramatically and know I need to address this too.

Irrespective of the technical difficulties with node tags though, bear 
in mind that a direct search doesn't address one of the main jobs the 
name finder does, that is to cope with variations in the names (Saint St 
Street, apostrophes and plurals or not, Strasse vs Straße and dozens, 
nay hundreds, of others). This is true for nodes including places as 
well as way names.

David