Neat, but with the usual USA-centricism: Despite the map starting at Frankfurt (the one in the west of Germany), and me being in Berlin (the one in the east of Germany) the first result for "Berlin" was the one in New Hampshire, USA.
But.. looking for "London", 2 of the first 3 airports are in North America and arguably a lot of people would not count any of the first 5 (Lydd, Oxford & Southend) as London. Heathrow doesn't show up at all without specifying further.
In theory, they could build a system which returns relevant airports ranked by size in terms of latest/peak passenger traffic figures
Tags:
addr:city=Denpasar
aeroway=aerodrome
iata=DPS
icao=WADD
name=Bandar Udara Internasional Ngurah Rai
name:de=Internationaler Flughafen Ngurah Rai
name:en=Ngurah Rai International Airport
name:fr=Aéroport International Ngurah Rai
name:ko=응우라라이공항
operator=PT. Angkasa Pura I
short_name=Bandara Internasional Ngurah Rai
type=civil
wikidata=Q1061846
wikipedia=id:Bandar Udara Internasional Ngurah Rai
or London Heathrow to Oxford Airport in around 60mins
that's no time at all compared to the driving distances between major US cities, which I'm guessing is what this is based on
Looks like the site was setup by a german (or at least someone that lives in Germany and speaks german).
It supports searching for other parts of the name (or closest (big-ish) city that airports tend to name themselves after).
However, the search seems to not work with spaces, so can only search for one word in the name, it seems.
I don't think being built by a German speaker has anything to do with it. Typing "Vienna" (the English name for the city) returns the expected airport first, perhaps because the IATA code is VIE. Typing "Wien" (the actual name of the city in German, used by the locals) puts it further down the list among funny little airfields in other places.
The UX lesson for us all: sorting of search results is hard. It helps to know who your users are, and what they are looking for. Fundamentally, my bigger question with this site - which looks awesome, and is fun to geek out over - is who is it for? Professional pilots obviously have their own resources already to tell them how to navigate around airports, where to park and where to taxi; the detailed information that would actually be useful for a first-time passenger at Frankfurt airport is completely lacking, eg. how long will it take me to transfer from an inbound London flight to my connection to a small town in Austria, how can I find shortcuts to shave a few minutes off that, will I have to go through extra security checks (the answer varies with the direction of travel and, apparently, the time of day), is it more convenient to stop off in the business lounge of the terminal where I arrive, before transferring, or the one that might be close to my departure gate, can I still enter Schengen through the electronic gates with a UK passport or must I join a long queue with the Americans and Japanese, where can I refill my water bottle and charge my phone for free, etc etc etc
The UX lesson here is that geocoding names to coordinates is hard. It's always a bit subjective. Another lesson is that search ranking is hard. Even though this is fine, it could be improved a little:
- take into account distance
- take into account size of the airport (number of graphical elements, runway, surface area, etc.)
- take into account size of nearby cities (there is some open data for that)
- support fuzzy search
- etc.