Ask HN: Alternatives to location search using Google Maps?

2 points by talivision 2 years ago | 3 comments

Have been trialing other tools to look-up places I'm interested in but have had mixed results here in Australia.

e.g. searching for a region in southern Victoria colloquially known as "wilsons prom" using OpenStreetMap Nominatim takes me to "Wilsons Prom Cafe & Pizza" rather than the region "Wilsons Promontory" nearby.

This and other bugbears have been stopping me from using non-Google tools for queries like this. Do any other FOSS map frontends give better results?

anenefan 2 years ago |

Took me a while to realise Google location and google maps are two different things, google location is actually well broken up my parts, so much so that various delivery services which delivered 10 years ago, slowly stopped bothering since most location services rely on google location ... even the government ffs, but a true blessing to alert who's a phone scammer. It was pretty borked but people in my locale are obviously slowly biting the bullet to make an account to correct their address inaccuracy, less errors I noted the last few months ... but as I see it as a deliberate dark pattern to gather more data so it's not what I encourage people to do.

Instead I tell people to use apple maps or just search for such places in DuckDuckGo, which from my experience is superior in that it returns the right place, last I check google location got half dozen wrong, apple maps via DDG got them perfectly.

Wilsons Promontory National Park, Wilsons Promontory VIC 3960, Australia was the first return in my DDG search.

sfkeller 2 years ago |

Try Photon as better front end to OSM.

And at least from now on, also OSM Nominatim now will "Wilsons Prom" afer I added this obvious local name: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2693245

austin-cheney 2 years ago |

Latitude and longitude work well enough, but military grid reference system works extremely well with Google maps down to 1 meter precision.