[OSM-talk] Announcing name searches for OSM

[David Earl]

Dean said:
> I guess it gives priority to older "objects" in the db?

No: the efficiency is achieved by (a) having a separate spatial index for
places only, and (b) restricting the name search to a limited set of areas
around the place requested (which should mean it is scalable as data density
increases) and having the area identifiers as indexed fields in the
database, so it can quickly isolate the names near to the desired place.

Having said that, we still have relatively few names and places in the
database so far.

See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Name_finder for a description of
the algorithm.

David