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Comment by ruph123 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this is really not an option for (some) areas in the US. After having moved to a populous LA area from Germany I was baffled at the lack of detail in the maps. Basic things like building numbers are entirely missing. Even after adding more and more details I would never fully rely on OSM here sadly. And if it only works sometimes why even bother using it in the first place? At least this was my progression. From fully using OSM, I am back to Google.

The only good in-between solution is MagicEarth which supplements OSM maps with data from lord knows where. However although they claim to be privacy cautious they are quite opaque.

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Also, do not fully rely on Google Maps knowing house numbers. Looks like in some areas (in UK for example) Google used some sort of OCR to find house numbers. There are houses and Wales with random house numbers that only have a house name; Numbering ends a few houses into dead-end alley where the Street View car didn't come; Or totally wrong numbers where house number sings are hard to read.

House names, rather than numbers, are very common in rural UK.

Australia went to mandatory house numbers in, I think, the 60s but my grandmother refused and gave out only her house name until she passed away in the 21st century.

Searching for my address just straight up doesn't work.

Named house rather than a number, and the postcode isn't a particular street but covers a number of little tracks up to various farms.

I also don't have a road name.

The address syntax is:

Building name

Town

County

Post code

The combination of no road and no number means Google absolutely fails. It just gives suggestions of businesses nearby... Ish.

Does your location have a Place ID? Google originated Place IDs for exactly this type of use case, so that people could find places like yours without an address.

A lot of the US road map was imported from TIGER (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topologically_Integrated_Geogr...>). This is an electronic mapping system set up in the 90s by the US Government to aid in conducting the census. The TIGER data doesn’t have any address information at all, just road shapes. No information about the type of road, the number of lanes, the quality of the surface, presence of sidewalks, signals at intersections, anything. Just the paths the roads follow, and those paths are often of extremely poor quality. The resulting OSM maps are barely usable; sometimes they are not even recognizable by locals.

So OSM has decent geographical coverage of the US, but relies very heavily on individual contributors to correct the deficiencies and add useful information to the maps. The only way it will be usable for you is if others have improved it. The only way it will be usable for others is if you jump back in and do the same.

> TIGER data doesn’t have any address information at all

In the EDGE tables it does have ZIP codes and house number ranges, split into left and right side of the road. ZIP codes were imported into OpenStreetMap data. House number ranges are imported into the OpenStreetMap search into a separate database table, so searching works in a lot of areas but it's far from complete, all the issues you mentioned with roads that don't even exist etc

I stand corrected. Maybe the TIGER data or the import process was improved at some point in the last decade?

Not heard of MagicEarth before - looks interesting but what's missing is a "Why/how is it free" statement. They don't cover how they monetise this, what's their business model.

Makes more sense to switch to bing maps, since they have ever so slightly better satelite imagery and there's no way in hell anyone would use bing for anything else anyway.

Interesting. In my experience, OSM's level of detail in Amsterdam is much higher than Google's. Especially in bike routes, an area that Google often sucks at.

OSM is usually better in Europe. Even some rural paths were mapped as streets in Google maps. But in USA it is probably other way around.

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