this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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The searchbox on osm.org is actually not even part of osm, it's a separate project called Nominatim:
The main goal of the Nominatim is geocoding by name and addresses, and it doesn't search in all osm parameters, just in names and addresses, so it can find only public bookcases which are named "public bookcase". But naming a bookcase "public bookcase" is against the tagging rules on osm, as such common descriptions shouldn't be added to the
name
tag: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names#Name_is_the_name_only~~So that searchbox there is wrong recommendation, it will find only mistagged bookcases.~~
Most of what you write is right, but not the part where you write it searches only in names and addresses, it does have some support for POIs. If I search for public bookcase near paris, the top three results are https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/12387870803 https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/9569806762 https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/11733421968 none of which have anything like "public bookcase" in their names, they are tagged amenity=public_bookcase though.
Wow, adding "near Paris" changes the results, but without it it only finds nodes with
name
=public bookcase
Yes, that's what I wrote in my first comment in this thread. It seems it recognizes "near" as a keyword to look up things in a map from POI descriptions to tags. I'm sure it's open source, so we could simply look there, but I don't know where that exact logic is located.
@schnurrito @infeeeee Nominatim recognises some "special phrases" with words like "near" and "in". This allows just a little bit of "natural language" searching for POIs.
There is some info on the OSM wiki at this link. Within that, the "current language" pages tell you which phrases are recognised per language. You can see that the English language page has several mappings related to public bookcases.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim/Special/_Phrases
Whaaat, I didn’t know that. You made my day.
Unfortunately, the French version isn’t so well‑rounded and doesn’t have bookcases.
Edit: @schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de and @infeeeee@lemmy.zip, you made my day too. You all are awesome and I’m leaving for work in an excellent mood.