Do you use the search functionality a lot, and is it giving you the results you want? And if so, do you have any tips on how to write search queries?

I love Organic Maps, but when I try to search, I think I find what I'm looking for about 1 out of 5 times.

Usually I will take an address from my email or browser and plug it in, so indeed the search feature is not something I use much.

Reliable search is just generally hard to implement for OSM, as it's highly chaotic. There's no single schema forced upon everyone. The same feature can be tagged in multiple ways, which are dependent on the consensus between mappers, country/jurisdiction, culture, particular mapper preference etc. This is especially relevant for addresses and businesses.

Um, the wiki is the single schema forced upon everyone: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org

Searching the schema works just fine, it's just hard to find typos and support natural language queries. Google set the standard for searching, we need to remember that we're literally comparing a volunteer project against the world leader in search who also has the money to employ a hundred distributed servers for every query versus the offline on-your-phone search of something like OsmAnd.

Borders is one of the few things that need to be different between countries (county, municipality, city group (Kreisstadt), city region (Städteregion), etc.: every country has a different hierarchy of subdivisions which OSM translates to numeric admin_level values). Some countries use the abbreviated street names like St. John St., others have the convention to expand Saint John Street. Different road types have different rules (is a tractor allowed on rural motorways? In Uganda maybe yes). These handful of things which you'll need to set per country are defined on the wiki, but 99% is the same. Particularly for searching where the name and POI tags like shop=x are the most relevant: after normalising the street name abbreviations, you're pretty much good.

OSM Wiki is not the mechanically enforced schema, it's just a collection of knowledge about the actual tagging practice. Which is entirely chaotic, and the collective consensus is dynamic - usually the most used tag wins, but there are less used alternatives here and there. There are many good proposals that failed to get traction due to too few people backing them up or for some other reason.

The addresses in particular are heavily dependent on the country and region. And of course OSM is a subject for controversies and stupid edit wars as well, just like Wikipedia.

I'm not criticizing OSM, mind you - just explaining why it's hard to implement a good search in it; you have to constantly adapt your application to what people actually use in the map in different countries/language communities.

See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Any_tags_you_like for confirmation of the first paragraph.

Well, to be fair, the search isn't working well even when you enter the exact string. I just last week searched for a specific address, entered exactly the correct street name and the app just did not show the street name in my target city as a result. When clicking on the right location (taken from memory) the address was shown correctly, just the search did not work at all.

Also, in the same city, route planning (by bus) did not work. Which was a bit funny to me, when I lived there 10 years ago the city refused to make the bus data available to Google Maps, so back then it was Google Maps that also could not do route planning there.

I like Organic Maps, with its offline functionality it provides a layer of reliability that Google Maps is missing - and my phone has no Gapps anyway. But it's a pity neither search nor navigation is close to what Google can offer.

> The same feature can be tagged in multiple ways

That is not huge problem. You can support just the most common schema. Except some rare cases it will not have real bad consequences (note: as OSM mapper I put quite significant effort into getting rid of some pointless duplicates, but I do not consider it a blocker for data use).

The problem is that making search working well with descriptive, incomplete, typoed, confused input is really, really, really hard. Google Maps search is the most amazing Google project for me.

Can you please send us more details about non-working search queries at support [at] organicmaps.app (or report it on our Github), considering that addresses or POIs that you're searching for are _present_ on osm.org ?

reported https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5890 for now

Edit: also https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5891

How is search implemented? Is it using Nominatim?

Both OM and OSM seem to be subpar in search.

Thanks, will do!

A workaround I saw a few months ago on HN: for both Organic Maps and OSMand, you can use Acastus to search for something and then open the result in the maps app (+ share the broken query with Organic Maps, as requested by the founder).

Acastus-Photon (An online address/POI search for navigation apps) https://f-droid.org/packages/name.gdr.acastus_photon/

Are you searching for street addresses or business names? Coverage of those is highly dependent on openstreetmap volunteer contributions.

You can often find opening times of shops by searching for their own Facebook page instead of using Google Maps. Moreover, you can add business’ opening hours to OpenStreetMap so that other people in future will see the opening hours in Organic Maps and other OSM-based maps. For a programming-savvy crowd like HN, the syntax of OSM’s opening-hours tag is pretty straightforward.

> you can add business’ opening hours to OpenStreetMap

And by far the easiest way to do this, if you have an Android phone, is to use the beautiful StreetComplete app: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/#readme

Street complete may be a bit more beginner friendly but if you just need to update hours or want to add details to several stores quickly everydoor is easier to me

https://every-door.app/

Worth taking a look at Street Complete Extended Edition too: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete.e...

You can do it directly in Organic Maps as well.

On iOS https://every-door.app/ wins for easiest `opening_hours` editor.

> by searching for their own Facebook page

At that point I'd rather open up Google and give them the data point that someone is interested in this store at this time (to make these crowdedness plots) than provide Facebook with my data ._.

If they have an own website, sure, but a Facebook page? I'm not whitelisting those IP addresses for my browser to be able to visit that.

This is why I always add the website as the most important field for a POI btw: easy to click through, always up-to-date opening hours. They're very often out of date on OSM because the shop owners only supply that info to google and call it good.

Because a Facebook page is the business’s own advertisement, you can add the opening hours displayed there straight to OpenStreetMap. (Google’s information obviously cannot be copied into OSM, and sometimes its opening hours are guessed from visitor data instead of added by the business itself.)

> This is why I always add the website as the most important field for a POI

It has been over a decade now since most physical-retail businesses began giving up on their own websites, using only Facebook pages instead, unless they are part of large chains.

> It has been over a decade now since most physical-retail businesses began giving up on maintaining their own websites, using only Facebook pages instead, unless they are part of large chains.

This was indeed a trend a few years ago, but it is not true anymore, in my personal experience. Even tiny shops, if they are only a bit more technologically knowledgable than average, tend to have their own web page.

> You can often find opening times of shops by searching for their own Facebook page

Maybe a US thing? Where I live, less than 10% of the shops have a Facebook page, and I'd expect maybe 10% of those have up to date reliable information.

There is no UI for opening hours in Organic Maps afaict. I think that's part of the complaint.

There is. When you click on a place, there is an "edit place" option which allows you to edit common details including business hours.

Oh, I see it now -- sometimes it's there, but for a lot of places I cannot even lift the drawer, probably because there is no data other than category, like "Cafe". So I cannot edit.

It usually means that you have outdated data. Update the app, update the data, try again.