Strange behaviour of search function

I’ve recently run into some trouble with the search function, in particular when looking for street or location names containing the word “bank” auch as Almondbury Bank, Horton Bank, etc. In such cases, I am not led to the desired place, but am presented with a long list of banks (financial institutions) that have nothing to do with any attributes entered. That has not happened until about a fortnight ago, but now it occurs with annoying regularity. It is almost worse than the major commercial search engines. Can anything be done so that the search gives priority to the complete expression, instead of picking single frequently used words?

Confirmed. When I search on OSM for those two places, I do get random banks. But when I use the Nominatim demo site, they come up fine:

Almondbury Bank
Horton Bank

@lonvia will be able to advise.

2 Likes

As nominatim is finding the right result, see:

https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html?q=Wood+Grove%2C+Wakefield

the question is rather why the bridge between openstreetmap-website and nominatim is producing different results and omitting the first result by nominatim.

One more instance of rather useless results: If I search for “Wood Grove, Wakefield” (a street name), I am presented with a smørgasbord of woodlands in West Yorkshire. Only if I put in “Wood Grove, Wakefield, Wakefield”, I am led to the proper place (a minor street in the suburb of Gawthorpe).

Is ist feasible to give priority to exact matches over “fuzzy” and partial ones? I believe this would resolve such and similar problems.