OpenStreetMap

stephan75's Diary

Photon ... a new geocoder for OSM data

Posted by stephan75 on 8 September 2013 in English.

Did you know there is (next to the well known Nominatim) a new open source geocoder (“Name and Adress Search”) built for OpenStreetMap data?

See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Photon

(found this link via http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Search_engines )

The demonstration website on komoot.de is quite impressive! I had a wish for such a feature (incremental and instant search) for years!

Anyone who finds wrong results or missing features / data?

Discussion

Comment from Aury88 on 8 September 2013 at 17:54

I didn’t found any wrong result. I can just say WOW.! Personally I’m more comfortable with this search_engine that with nominatim … It’s more user-friendly (Imho) and the Search-as-you-Type feature is very effective and impressive. thank you for mentioning and thank to the komoot developers for this jewel!

Comment from Pan on 9 September 2013 at 08:49

I am very much impressed! This search engine is excellent.

Comment from marazeka on 9 September 2013 at 09:51

Very interesting stuff. I practice material on the subject. I found this one Steve’s blog.

Comment from OliverG on 11 September 2013 at 13:13

Wow, this is great! Results are good, and search-as-you-type is really neat. Nominatim is more like the main OSM map: good for debugging and for inspecting the map for problems. Nominatim is no match for Google Maps search - but this search engine might be!

Drawbacks of Komoot against Google so far:

  • doesn’t cover the whole world (yet?) - eg. America seems to be missing
  • targeted for single results; for “aldi bremen” Google gives 10 result markers on one map, while Komoot wants me to pick one result from the dropdown (which makes sense for a route planner)
  • Google has better handling of input typos (for “ostedeich bremen” Google goes to Osterdeich in Bremen as desired, while Komoot goes to some street 50km away) Anyway, I’d appreciate having something like the Komoot search on osm.org.

Btw. the cycle tour planner at Komoot is quite remarkable as well.

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