The default search functionality on OSM ("reverse geocoding" in mapspeak) does, indeed, need a lot of improvement. It's actually a separate project called Nomin

The default search functionality on OSM ("reverse geocoding" in mapspeak) does, indeed, need a lot of improvement. It's actually a separate project called Nominatim[1]. It's on Github and you can browse the issues and see a lot of similar complaints. It's a daunting problem, parsing a free text query that may be in any language and trying to best match it with addresses that are standardized a hundred different ways all over the globe. In its current state it isn't good enough for everyday use. It's annoying how often a Google Maps search sends me to the wrong state or even the wrong country. But with Nominatim it's almost a given. This underscores one of the fundamental features/bugs of the OSM project: It's pretty good at attracting mappers, developers, and 3rd-party projects that use its data and APIs, but it's never really been designed to meet the needs of end users. UX, according to the classic OSM schema, is to be implemented by the various 3rd parties in whatever way suits them best. If someone wants to develop and host a Google Maps replacement using OSM data they're welcome to do it (and they can provide their own reverse geocoding solution if necessary) but that's not an immediate goal of OSM itself, according to the current leadership. [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim