[OSM-talk] Namefinder

[David Earl]

Jack Stringer wrote:
> Is there a reason why the index on Name Finder is out of date? On the
> search page it says last update Jan 9, 2009.
> 
>>From the wiki[1] I get the idea it updated daily, but stuff I added a
> week ago, and several months ago is not showing up.

It should have been updating daily, but there were performance problems 
that led to us suspending it back in January. Sands of time have passed 
at alarming speed since then.

The good news, however, is that I started rebuilding the index on Monday 
with some changes that will hopefully resolve the main performance 
issue. Staring from scratch takes and immense amount of time, but once 
it's running we can go back to daily updates. This is likely to take a 
couple of weeks.

There is a secondary performance issue in searching which replacing 
MySQL with PostgreSQL may address. So I will do some experiments with 
that once we have a working system again.

There is a potential replacement or competitor in the wings.

At SOTM, it was announced that the Geocommons geocoder was being made 
open source. This will probably also influence our longer term strategy, 
though it's too early to say how yet.

So sorry for the interruption, but I hope to have things back on line in 
a couple of weeks.

David