[OSM-talk] Nominatim on the main page

[Sarah Hoffmann]

On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 08:12:45PM +0100, Maarten Deen wrote:
> On 2018-02-18 20:07, Paul Johnson wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 12:53 PM, Maarten Deen <mdeen at xs4all.nl>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > > On 2018-02-18 19:28, Tom Hughes wrote:
> 
> > > I can't comment about how the algorithm works because I don't know
> > > anything about it. I'm just saying that we do tell it the viewbox
> > 
> >  It appears to me that the bounding box is used when searching places
> > (towns, cities) or streets, but not when searching objects like shops
> > or restaurants.
> > For instance, searching for a McDonald's always gives me the
> > McDonald's at 1351, George Dieter Drive, El Paso City, El Paso County,
> > Texas, 79936, Verenigde Staten van Amerika

To fix that please delete all the wikipedia=McDonalds tags from
the McDonalds restaurants that show up inappropriately. Nominatim uses
the wikipedia links to determine how well known a place might be and
ranks places with a wikipedia tag higher. That naturally only works
when the wikipedia tags actually link to a wikipedia page that
describes the object. It leads to funny results when the link goes
to category pages or, like in this case, to the company description.

Alternatively: I've proposed a GSoC to overhaul the Wikipedia
importances that Nominatim uses. Getting rid of this particular
problem from the Nominatim side would be part of this job.

For more information, see:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2018/Project_Ideas#Nominatim

There are also two other topics proposed and if you have another particular
itch you want to sratch, there are surely ways they can be transformed into
a GSoC topic. Just send me a email or open an issue in github. It would be wonderful, if
we find some students interested in geocoding this year.

Kind regards

Sarah