Just another reply saying "OSM is completely useless where I live".
If I enter my street address into Google Maps, it shows my house. If I enter it into OSM it says "No results found" and can't even figure out what country or city I am in.
Just out of curiosity, have you looked into what data is missing? Is the house (or at least the street) mapped, but missing the street name or the house number (assuming you live somewhere where these are relevant), or is the street completely missing?
OSM doesn't support/understand the street numbering scheme used in my country. If I rewrite my address in the format OSM thinks I should be using, then at least it can find the street I am on. But I'm not going to write addresses differently just for one website...especially when Google Maps understands how we write addresses.
Hi, I'm a long time OSMer, and I'd like to help. OSM has a flexible tagging system, so it could be possible to map your addresses the way they should be. You shouldn't have to shoe-horn things into a schema that doesn't fit you.
Addresses here are written like "220/9 xo viet nghe tinh", which means "go to 220 on Xo Viet Nghe Tinh and turn into the alley there, go to #9 in the alley".
Typing "220/9 xo viet nghe tinh" into OSM results in "No results found". Instead I have to write "hem 220/9 xo viet nghe tinh" for it to find the road; no one writes it that way.
A house address would be "220/9/14 xo viet nghe tinh" meaning "go to 220 on Xo Viet Nghe Tinh and turn into the alley there; go to #9 and turn into the next alley you find there; then go to house #14".
The only way OSM can figure things out is if I write it like "14 hem 220/9 xo viet nghe tinh"
Nominatim processes OSM data, associating items of interest with features like town boundaries that enclose the item, or place markers that are nearby, and then is also a fairly pedantic search interface for that data.
Photon takes the data that Nominatim generates and sticks a more flexible search on top of it.
Checking for/creating an issue for Nominatim describing the address format that doesn't work well would be a useful thing to do, as global support is a goal there.
> You declined to do so, but that's your decision.
This kind of patronizing attitude is unnecessary and silly. The vast majority of users of any software product are only interested in being just that: users. And that's totally okay. No need for passive-aggressive shaming.
After re-reading my own comment, I agree and am sorry. I meant to put the emphasis on "your decision", in order to highlight the freedom argument for OSM. I realise it totally sounded like the emphasis was on "you declined", which makes it a personal attack, and that was never intended nor necessary.
The vast majority who make use of OSM data probably aren't even aware of what Open Street Map is, nor that they can contribute data to such a thing, or of how they could do so.
That’s not an extremely compelling argument. I could host a web-based persistent infinite bitmap canvas where anyone can draw anything they want, and that would still be a much worse map than Google Maps despite the fact that the friction to contribute is as low as it could be.
If I enter my street address into Google Maps, it shows my house. If I enter it into OSM it says "No results found" and can't even figure out what country or city I am in.