Why doesn't the OSM-Search functionality work properly?

Help and support
1

Hello,
why is the search function of OpenStreetmap.org so bad? If I type in something really really easy such as: “Decatlon Leipzig”
decatlon leipzig | OpenStreetMap

There are no results. But It should be found!

Best regards desputin

1 Like
2

2x ‘Decatlon’ without the h maybe?

3

“why is the search function of OpenStreetmap.org so bad?” - because implementing something able to interpret mistyped and/or descriptive input is incredibly hard and not really done so far by open source geosearch

5

Use https://photon.komoot.io/ or even better run it yourself (it is based on data generated by the same geocoder/search engine Nominatim).

7

And why can then komoot find “decatlon leipzig” (without ‘h’) and OSM not? Is it just a configuration issue?

1 Like
4

Oh, sorry. My mistake :frowning: But maybe it would be practical to have a search that is more tolerant to errors. I think all kinds of search engines or Wikipedia (and especially google) use a more “error-tolerant” search approach… – desputin just now

1 Like
6

Ok, thanks, I’ll check out komoot.

About fuzzy search. This shouldn’t bee too hard to implement: For example:

8

Also like others I would recommend checking out komoot, although I won’t entirely agree with your opinion to which you are of course entitled. For me OpenStreet map gives some opportunity and opportunity to search, on the other hand it is as you say, there are often results not available.