Search Improvements: Limit range and accept abbreviations (Rd & Road, St & Street)

[sbridger]

trafficstars

Can the search range be limited. e.g to the same country, or XXXkm or something. It impacts usability when 90% of search results are more than 10,000km away.

In the same vein, the map databases seem to have a mix of rd and road , but the search functions do not alias them. This exacerbates the problem.

[rinigus]

Please add:

• which search provider did you use?
• was location known at the time of search?

Currently, Pure Maps does ask, from providers that support it, to have a local bias. But maybe more can be done

[sbridger]

Maps: Mapbox osm-scout-server has australia-oceania/new zealand.

I have not noticed that having gps lock makes any difference to search.

Currently, Pure Maps does ask, from providers that support it, to have a local bias.

Obviously it is totally unimplemented at their end, as I get search results from pretty much anywhere on earth with english-derived street names that overlap.

[rinigus]

See which provider is under Search :) . I presume it is a default one then - Photon

Are you searching Online or Offline? For offline, I have to implement it in OSM Scout Server

[sbridger]

Yes it is photon. If I search offline I only get local (obviously I only have aus/nz) If online/mixed I get names from everywhere in the world. e.g if I type "quee" I will get matches from france, signapore etc. If I type "queen st", I will get 2 (duplicate) local matches, but none of the other queen streets in the country

So Photon is clearly working pretty poorly.

OSM is only giving me NZ local. Almost all are duplicated however. Looking at "Queen Street, Tasman" the two are identical information and lat/lon, so appear to be true duplicates, (not similar but very slightly different entries in the database.) So the results don't seem to have any sorting - not by road type (secondary,tertiary etc), alphabetic, or distance

The db seems to be pretty poor, lots of "queen street"s aren't showing, and other details like town/district are really poor. I guess we don't get what we don't pay for. [Could Here be an online search provider. Seems odd not to search using it if using it for mapping]

In offline, I get the same duplicates . Ah! I see that OSM in "mixed" was using the offline - there is no online OSM db. If I use online:opencage I do get global matches, but it seems to be doing better than photon.

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An issue is that the list control used to show the results, has a lot of the text off screen (I have large font size), and no way to scroll it across to see it. (You can't turn into landscape, as the keyboard covers the screen.) I have noticed this issue with the sfos ui before. Not sure if there is a fix.

[sbridger]

OK, lots of comment, but what can you do about it? Suggested changes:

• remove duplicates
• sort results. Probably by distance from map centre
• remove results beyond a max search distance (from map centre) . less important when results are sorted by distance anyway.

[rinigus]

I can reproduce this with Photon. Looks like a regression, will have to look into it.