[Geocoding] Better Results on Openstreetmap.org than our own instance

[Steven Melendez]

Hi there,

I¹m Steven Melendez, and I work at WNYC Radio in New York on data news
projects. 

We have a large number of New York City addresses we were hoping to geocode,
and got good results from http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ so we decided
to install Nominatim locally on an Ubuntu machine.

Anyway, I followed the installation instructions and loaded
http://download.geofabrik.de/north-america/us/new-york-latest.osm.pbf (as of
yesterday) into the database, but I¹m generally not able to find particular
house numbers on my local instance,  even though I can on
nominatim.openstreetmap.org. Is there some other data file I also need to
load? 

I¹ve tried with both the latest release version of nominatim and the head
version from github, with the same result.

For instance, for our offices, the query
search.php?q=160+varick+st%2C+10013&format=json on openstreetmap.org finds
the exact location of our offices at 160 Varick St, returning

[
{
place_id: "5108296943",
licence: "Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright",
boundingbox: [
40.726551,
40.726651,
-74.005572666667,
-74.005472666667
],
lat: "40.726601",
lon: "-74.0055226666667",
display_name: "160, Varick Street, West Village Houses, Greenwich Village,
New York City, New York, 10013, United States of America",
class: "place",
type: "house",
importance: 0.715
}
]

but on my local machine it returns

[
{
place_id: "582751",
licence: "Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright",
osm_type: "way",
osm_id: "46139034",
boundingbox: [
"40.7243995666504",
"40.7286033630371",
"-74.0060195922852",
"-74.0053100585938"
],
lat: "40.726435",
lon: "-74.005658",
display_name: "Varick Street, West Village Houses, Greenwich Village, New
York City, New York, 10014, United States of America",
class: "highway",
type: "primary",
importance: 0.6
},
{
place_id: "610256",
licence: "Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright",
osm_type: "way",
osm_id: "68675820",
boundingbox: [
"40.7182655334473",
"40.7204399108887",
"-74.0070571899414",
"-74.0066909790039"
],
lat: "40.7191033",
lon: "-74.0069601",
display_name: "Varick Street, Tribeca, Greenwich Village, New York City, New
York, 10014, United States of America",
class: "highway",
type: "secondary",
importance: 0.6
}
]

which seems to only find two points along the street.

Any thoughts as to why the discrepancy, and if there is something I can
do/load into my system to make it more precise?

Thanks for your help,

Steven Melendez


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