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Comment by tekchip | Hacker News Reader

OSM and OsmAnd seem great except when you want to search for something. If I search for "mcdonalds" typed lazily I get 5 results hundreds of miles away. To find the local Mcdonalds restaurant I have to type "McDonald's" very specifically. This lack of fuzzy search makes these apps unusable.

Its an unfortunate situation of the two parties involved in this software each pointing at each other and blaming the other with neither willing to budge.

OSM, I would argue rightly says it's up to map makers how to query the data their project puts out there. The app makers claim (this sounds like BS) that OSM's data or API makes that too hard to do.

Either way absolutely unusable. If TomTom can just make a search that works better than this and layer that over the OSM data they've got a win IMO.

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Someone should build a good, open, web API-based search for OSM data. Not everyone cares about 100% offline capabilities, and improving search would be a massive gain in usability for OsmAnd and other OSM clients.

I don't see why Lucene couldn't be used for this application.

Why could it? Don't you somehow have to teach it which words are synonyms and common combinations for autocomplete etc.? It seems to me at least that this is where the major work would be, and even then it's expensive to run this for the whole world just for free.

Like https://github.com/komoot/photon/ or https://github.com/pelias/pelias ?

I'm pretty sure this exists, but the tooling around OSM all seems pretty obscure and badly documented. There aren't really flagship apps, which I'd argue there should be. It took me a lot of research (on official OSM pages) to find Organic Maps.

> I search for "mcdonalds" typed lazily I get 5 results hundreds of miles away. To find the local Mcdonalds restaurant I have to type "McDonald's" very specifically.

Very true. I do cut them some slack when I remember that they're essentially competing against the world leader in search. (Not that I use their search engine, but it's not for a lack of quality that I stopped using it.)

> If TomTom can just make a search that works better than this and layer that over the OSM data they've got a win IMO.

Exactly! I'd love to pay for such a product. Even better if they don't reinvent the wheel and instead just polish OsmAnd that can almost do more things than any individual person can ever know about.

Yeah I tried switching to OsmAnd for a while. It works fine as a map. Interface is a little clunky. The real problem is I mostly use Google Maps to search for places and OsmAnd was terrible for that. I reluctantly switched back to Google Maps, but I look forward to the day I can drop it for an OSM-based solution.

Have you tried Organic Maps?

I haven't. Is the search functionality much better?

It's not as good as on Google Maps (where google can show you most popular places based on reviews) but it's good enough for me. For example I didn't had "macdonalds" problem described by the parent comment.

Plus it's very fast app with a clean interface. 100% open-source and actively developed. I can totally recommend it.

OsmAnd is also very bad in many states where you can't search for addresses because they don't have the data. Georgia is one example.

I often have to use a third party to convert address to GPS coordinates.

That McDonalds thing happens to me even with Google Maps. Sometimes shows locations in another state instead of the closest ones sorted to top.

I wouldn't say that makes it unusable, I use it. But it is annoying using third parry to search and then using OSM for navigation.

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