Search

Hi all

I’ve added several recycling sites to the map in Bahrain. But when I search for ‘recycling’ with the map zoomed to show the island, the search results are… all for Germany!

I had expected the search to look in the tag values and keys for the currently displayed data set. Why doesn’t it do this? It seems to make the search function somewhat useless, and surely makes the whole map a lot less useful

Have I completely misunderstood something?

Cheers

Nick

It looks like the search box looks for name tags. So unless you name the recycling point “recycling” you won’t find them.

“recycling near Bahrain” should do what you are looking for.

The primary search function only takes the various name and ref tags into account and not arbitrary other key value tags, as the name is generally what people (i.e. non mappers) look for. If you want to specifically look for OSM data with certain key value pairs, you should probably use something like XAPI.

However the search functionality does support POI searches too for a select set of POIs. This gets triggered by the “near” keyword in the search. So for example “restaurant near Manama” will give you objects tagged as restaurants and “recycling near Barain” objects tagged as recycling.

Furthermore, the search does take the viewport of the map into account, but expands the search worldwide if it can’t find anything under that name in that area.

Ahh, I see. That doesn’t seem completely intuitive (I would never have worked it out), but if that’s how the majority of people search then fair enough.

I have to say I think it would also be useful it the results were shown as a lot of arrows all at once on the map too. Presumably all this got worked out in the early days of the map…

Nick