Search algorithm bug?

Help and support
1

Sorry, I don’t know if this is the correct place to place this issue, I’m kinda new here…

Problem :

  • Go to OSM website
  • Search for “Marl”
  • Get “Mali” as the only result

Sure, I can click on “More results”, to actually recieve the results I was expecting in the first place, but WTF??

My guess is that there’s a priority in the search algorithm, which likes to present countries to me at first, rather than some insignificant small town. That’s perfectly fine.
But if I spell something correctly, the algorithm should always prioritize what I am actually looking for, before trying to guess whether I might have made some spelling mistake.
I consider the presentation of a wrong hit by the search algorithm, while hiding the correct hits, as a serious bug.

(Also: if there’s only five results in total anyways, is it really necessary to hide anything behind “More results”?)

2

You can report issues with Nominatim, OSM’s search, at GitHub - osm-search/Nominatim: Open Source search based on OpenStreetMap data

A few helpful hints when reporting an issue:

  • Don’t use pejorative language like “WTF??”
  • Don’t guess what the cause might be (unless you’ve looked through the source and have figured it out!), just report the issue
  • Don’t call it a “serious bug” - it’s not your role to triage it, volunteer developers work on what they want to work on :slight_smile:
8 Likes
3

That’s one of the catches of supporting many languages. One of them happens to call Mali “Marl” (at least in the automatic transliteration of the script of the language).

If Mali doesn’t happen to be in the view, you also get other results right away: marl | OpenStreetMap

Not optimal, but also not the easiest to fix. Getting prominence of results rights is mostly guess work.

1 Like
4

Make Marl great again!!
I’m tellin’ ya.

5

Thank you for the explanation.

Surely prominence of results could be sorted by proximity to current coordinates?

(Also, I’m pretty sure I did not get a hit for “Marl, Kreis Recklinghausen” at all, that day. At least that somehow got fixed now.)

But no, when I open OSM for example as

And then Search for “Marl”, I do not get the other results right away, I have to click on “More results” first.