[OSM-talk] Nominatim weakness

[Maarten Deen]

On 2015-12-14 09:25, Sarah Hoffmann wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 05:52:21PM -0500, John Goodman wrote:
>> Am I missing something, or is there no way to sort Nominatim
>> searches on the main OpenStreetMap map page?
>> 
>> For example, if my map is showing an area of the United States where
>> I happen to know a mapped Starbucks exists, and I search for
>> "Starbucks" in the search panel, the entire panel is filled with
>> Starbucks in Japan. Do the same on a "competitor's" map, and you get
>> what you expect: the Starbucks that are closest to the current map
>> view are listed first.
> 
> Some helpful person has put a wikipedia link to the Starbucks
> wikipedia page on every single Starbucks in Japan. That's what
> throwing off Nominatim. Having a wikipedia page boosts the importance
> of an object. And in this case the boost is quite large because
> the Starbucks wiipedia page is pretty prominent.
> 
> Nominatim does take into account the current view (and, yes, the
> OSM page sends exactly the right parameters for that) but unless
> explicitly requested, the searches are not bounded. That means
> the importance of the object is weighted aganst how far away it
> is from the current map view. In the case of the wikipedia-tagged
> Starbucks importance wins.
> 
> To make a long story short: it's a tagging error. The wikipedia tag
> should contain only links to wikipedia pages describing the object
> not to pages about the operator.

IMHO it is a programming error on the account of importance. No amount 
of importance could be so great that local results get flooded and 
pushed down so much in importance.
In the Netherlands there is one Starbucks I believe (Schiphol Airport) 
and even standing at that location does not return it in the search.

That can not be put to tagging error, the website links to a japan 
website so it should only be of importance to searches in Japan.

Regards,
Maarten