4 ms·

One of the main things that keeps me from using essentially all OSM-based mapping apps as my primary is that search seems incredibly bad. I can't blend city and

by Groxx 3mo ago

One of the main things that keeps me from using essentially all OSM-based mapping apps as my primary is that search seems incredibly bad. I can't blend city and name, road and category, can't usually filter by features or open time, and results are almost always something like: - a result 500 feet away that sounds nothing like what you searched for - a result 23 miles away that shares one word but nothing else - a result 572 miles away that has a business name that contains exactly what was searched - ... nowhere is there an exact full-name match that is 1.3 miles away, which can easily be found by exploring the map Are there any apps that do this better? Android and desktop (e.g. linux) ideally. I'd love to use them more, but I've had endless problems using them. Good map data is kinda useless if it can't be retrieved, and trying to work around it by panning around and manually saving a hundred or so favorites really kinda sucks.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3mo ago
Open source? Not that I've found. I use HERE WeGo for searching and driving, and CoMaps for walking around.
stevage 3mo ago
True, although I do also have a lot of problems with Google Maps. Particularly, when I search for a small town 100km away, and instead it brings up a medium sized down in the USA. Or even more ridiculous cases, like I slightly got the name of a business wrong, so it went with a different business in the USA. Yeah, it really loves to suggest US options.
maelito 3mo ago
Could you try https://cartes.app https://cartes.app and share your search terms and expectations ? We're using Photon, an OpenSearch search engine. We've build a dictionary of place categories to help in-browser with FuseJS. Also thinking about using embeddings to complement this.
- Handrail 3mo ago
  Cartes search and user experience was surprisingly good! Well done. I was caught off guard by having the requirement for a Bluesky account for reviews instead of something open source/federated but wasn't able to read the explanation page as it was french only, but I think the international version is still work in progress, so I'll gladly return in the future.
  - maelito 3mo ago
    Thanks ! We're not using Bluesky, but Atproto ;) So place reviews is federated and open-source : we use Eurosky/Mu.social daily for our social accounts. Also, Bluesky itself is open-source. > but I think the international version is still work in progress, so I'll gladly return in the future. Yes sorry, we're working on it, daily !
    - Handrail 3mo ago
      Thanks for elaborating, very cool! And thanks for all your work, I'll be sure to try it properly and understand it a bit more.
- Groxx 3mo ago
  Initial attempts and results: https://cartes.app/#8.61/37.5261/-121.7338 https://cartes.app/#8.61/37.5261/-121.7338 constant up and down movement at any middle zoom level, e.g. this one. zoomed far out or far in (<20km or so visible) it's stable, e.g. https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-122.37618%7C37.68632#11.27/37.7499/-122.4066 https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-12... moves most of the screen up and down, while https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-122.37618%7C37.68632#12.16/37.72668/-122.40303 https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-12... is stable. (this appears to be the case roughly anywhere, this is just an example) https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/orfhap34liecdon618wkv/Screencast_20260707_181543.mp4?rlkey=stbu67imwwdezggg813so04hi&st=ncsyoelg&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/orfhap34liecdon618wkv/Screenc... for a screen recording. for below, all have "here" selected (not "everywhere") and this same view: https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962 https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962 "coffee": shows city names in other states, and two places in Iraq. "valentine": shows... house icons? and a business icon in other states and countries. (top result is apparently a "commune" in France. not sure I'd use a house icon for that tbh) "valentine coffee": good substring matches for the business name (3 results) and two results in other countries. "val coffee" (exploring substring behavior): finds one good match from the previous search... but it also shows "Stone Creek Coffee"? what part of that node matches "val" but not "coffee" on its own? https://cartes.app/?allez=Stone+Creek+Coffee%7Cn5066972575%7C-87.91709%7C43.03529#15/43.03529/-87.91709 https://cartes.app/?allez=Stone+Creek+Coffee%7Cn5066972575%7... -> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5066972575 https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5066972575 "vendetta": finds 3 good results, e.g. https://cartes.app/?allez=Vendetta+Coffee+Bar%7Cn11268671206%7C-87.91240%7C43.02567 https://cartes.app/?allez=Vendetta+Coffee+Bar%7Cn11268671206... , but why does this work when "valentine" does not? so... pretty normal results for open-source OSM apps afaict. maybe slightly better than average.
  - maelito 3mo ago
    Thanks a lot for your report ! The shaking is probably caused by an aggressive option in Firefox : see this issue https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2095 https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2095. We can't really act on this, it appears to break a lot of websites :/ Maybe we should try to auto-detect it and show a dialog to the user. > for below, all have "here" selected (not "everywhere") and this same view: https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962 https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962 Thanks, it lets me understand the bugs that make coffees impossible to be found for you. The first problem is that for performance reasons, we don't enable category discovery and search at high zoom. They only appear at zoom 13 (https://cartes.app/#13.7/43.04398/-87.911 https://cartes.app/#13.7/43.04398/-87.911), and your link was at zoom 12.41. This category suggestion would have let you show all coffee places on the map. But not yet filter your searches to this category only, that will be a game-changer feature we're working on. The zoom limitation is a known problem, but probably worse in the US where cities are less dense than in Europe. I'll prioritize it, thanks. 2nd problem is that the "coffee" word doesn't trigger the coffee category. It should, I'll investigate too. On your link, two Valentine coffee are shown on the map with the query "valentine", but none are in the search results list, and they're on the edges of the map. Interesting bug : probably a side effect of adding address search last week, I'll investigate. You're probably our first US-user test, thanks again :)
stevage 3mo ago
> Good map data is kinda useless if it can't be retrieved, and trying to work around it by panning around and manually saving a hundred or so favorites really kinda sucks. There are different ways of using maps. A lot of the stuff I do with mapping apps I really do just pan and zoom, and that works for me.
throwaway284534 3mo ago
Search is a really tough problem in OSM for a few reasons, but I think a lot it stems from bad address parsing. I’ve been working on geocoder which uses a trained model to parse and classify address queries into a tokenized form. In addition to being more accurate than traditional rule-based parsing, this approach also gives the search engine more to work with beyond the tokenized boundaries of each word. The model also attaches provenance annotations to the address components, allowing the geocoder to have a better understanding of the geographic hierarchy of the components makes sense, rather than matching a string in a database. The code is changing fast but you can try it out entirely in your browser here! Let me know if you’d like to see any specific features not on the roadmap :) https://mailwoman.sister.software/ https://mailwoman.sister.software/
- Groxx 3mo ago
  Is this referring to the difficulty of figuring out what "123 w dhuwdaodks plk" means? I can certainly see that (especially internationally - model-based parsing makes a lot of sense there, assuming enough good training data exists), but like I reliably can't even find precise matches in dedicated fields like "business name" or "city". Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and no open source app I've found yet seems to offer any way to select or filter on fields that definitely exist across locations that definitely exist (I've checked the data by hand). It feels extremely strange, like they're all trying to copy each other without stepping back and figuring out if any of it makes any sense at all to their stated audience.
  - Groxx 3mo ago
    (as I can no longer edit) concretely, here's an example search session: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48825127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48825127 I mean it when I say that's "maybe slightly better than average". When it gets extra weird I generally go check the OSM node data out of curiosity, and fairly often I find searches returning things where literally no field at all matches any word I searched for, across many different apps. I don't really think that's an address parsing issue, though I have definitely noticed many apps being picky (but completely unspecified) about search formatting when looking for addresses.

by Groxx 3mo ago

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3mo ago

Open source? Not that I've found. I use HERE WeGo for searching and driving, and CoMaps for walking around.

stevage 3mo ago

True, although I do also have a lot of problems with Google Maps. Particularly, when I search for a small town 100km away, and instead it brings up a medium sized down in the USA. Or even more ridiculous cases, like I slightly got the name of a business wrong, so it went with a different business in the USA. Yeah, it really loves to suggest US options.

maelito 3mo ago

Could you try https://cartes.app https://cartes.app and share your search terms and expectations ? We're using Photon, an OpenSearch search engine. We've build a dictionary of place categories to help in-browser with FuseJS. Also thinking about using embeddings to complement this.

Handrail 3mo ago
Cartes search and user experience was surprisingly good! Well done. I was caught off guard by having the requirement for a Bluesky account for reviews instead of something open source/federated but wasn't able to read the explanation page as it was french only, but I think the international version is still work in progress, so I'll gladly return in the future.
- maelito 3mo ago
  Thanks ! We're not using Bluesky, but Atproto ;) So place reviews is federated and open-source : we use Eurosky/Mu.social daily for our social accounts. Also, Bluesky itself is open-source. > but I think the international version is still work in progress, so I'll gladly return in the future. Yes sorry, we're working on it, daily !
  - Handrail 3mo ago
    Thanks for elaborating, very cool! And thanks for all your work, I'll be sure to try it properly and understand it a bit more.
Groxx 3mo ago
Initial attempts and results: https://cartes.app/#8.61/37.5261/-121.7338 https://cartes.app/#8.61/37.5261/-121.7338 constant up and down movement at any middle zoom level, e.g. this one. zoomed far out or far in (<20km or so visible) it's stable, e.g. https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-122.37618%7C37.68632#11.27/37.7499/-122.4066 https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-12... moves most of the screen up and down, while https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-122.37618%7C37.68632#12.16/37.72668/-122.40303 https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-12... is stable. (this appears to be the case roughly anywhere, this is just an example) https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/orfhap34liecdon618wkv/Screencast_20260707_181543.mp4?rlkey=stbu67imwwdezggg813so04hi&st=ncsyoelg&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/orfhap34liecdon618wkv/Screenc... for a screen recording. for below, all have "here" selected (not "everywhere") and this same view: https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962 https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962 "coffee": shows city names in other states, and two places in Iraq. "valentine": shows... house icons? and a business icon in other states and countries. (top result is apparently a "commune" in France. not sure I'd use a house icon for that tbh) "valentine coffee": good substring matches for the business name (3 results) and two results in other countries. "val coffee" (exploring substring behavior): finds one good match from the previous search... but it also shows "Stone Creek Coffee"? what part of that node matches "val" but not "coffee" on its own? https://cartes.app/?allez=Stone+Creek+Coffee%7Cn5066972575%7C-87.91709%7C43.03529#15/43.03529/-87.91709 https://cartes.app/?allez=Stone+Creek+Coffee%7Cn5066972575%7... -> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5066972575 https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5066972575 "vendetta": finds 3 good results, e.g. https://cartes.app/?allez=Vendetta+Coffee+Bar%7Cn11268671206%7C-87.91240%7C43.02567 https://cartes.app/?allez=Vendetta+Coffee+Bar%7Cn11268671206... , but why does this work when "valentine" does not? so... pretty normal results for open-source OSM apps afaict. maybe slightly better than average.
- maelito 3mo ago
  Thanks a lot for your report ! The shaking is probably caused by an aggressive option in Firefox : see this issue https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2095 https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2095. We can't really act on this, it appears to break a lot of websites :/ Maybe we should try to auto-detect it and show a dialog to the user. > for below, all have "here" selected (not "everywhere") and this same view: https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962 https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962 Thanks, it lets me understand the bugs that make coffees impossible to be found for you. The first problem is that for performance reasons, we don't enable category discovery and search at high zoom. They only appear at zoom 13 (https://cartes.app/#13.7/43.04398/-87.911 https://cartes.app/#13.7/43.04398/-87.911), and your link was at zoom 12.41. This category suggestion would have let you show all coffee places on the map. But not yet filter your searches to this category only, that will be a game-changer feature we're working on. The zoom limitation is a known problem, but probably worse in the US where cities are less dense than in Europe. I'll prioritize it, thanks. 2nd problem is that the "coffee" word doesn't trigger the coffee category. It should, I'll investigate too. On your link, two Valentine coffee are shown on the map with the query "valentine", but none are in the search results list, and they're on the edges of the map. Interesting bug : probably a side effect of adding address search last week, I'll investigate. You're probably our first US-user test, thanks again :)

stevage 3mo ago

> Good map data is kinda useless if it can't be retrieved, and trying to work around it by panning around and manually saving a hundred or so favorites really kinda sucks. There are different ways of using maps. A lot of the stuff I do with mapping apps I really do just pan and zoom, and that works for me.

throwaway284534 3mo ago

Search is a really tough problem in OSM for a few reasons, but I think a lot it stems from bad address parsing. I’ve been working on geocoder which uses a trained model to parse and classify address queries into a tokenized form. In addition to being more accurate than traditional rule-based parsing, this approach also gives the search engine more to work with beyond the tokenized boundaries of each word. The model also attaches provenance annotations to the address components, allowing the geocoder to have a better understanding of the geographic hierarchy of the components makes sense, rather than matching a string in a database. The code is changing fast but you can try it out entirely in your browser here! Let me know if you’d like to see any specific features not on the roadmap :) https://mailwoman.sister.software/ https://mailwoman.sister.software/

Groxx 3mo ago
Is this referring to the difficulty of figuring out what "123 w dhuwdaodks plk" means? I can certainly see that (especially internationally - model-based parsing makes a lot of sense there, assuming enough good training data exists), but like I reliably can't even find precise matches in dedicated fields like "business name" or "city". Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and no open source app I've found yet seems to offer any way to select or filter on fields that definitely exist across locations that definitely exist (I've checked the data by hand). It feels extremely strange, like they're all trying to copy each other without stepping back and figuring out if any of it makes any sense at all to their stated audience.
- Groxx 3mo ago
  (as I can no longer edit) concretely, here's an example search session: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48825127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48825127 I mean it when I say that's "maybe slightly better than average". When it gets extra weird I generally go check the OSM node data out of curiosity, and fairly often I find searches returning things where literally no field at all matches any word I searched for, across many different apps. I don't really think that's an address parsing issue, though I have definitely noticed many apps being picky (but completely unspecified) about search formatting when looking for addresses.