I tried two fairly basic searches and both had pretty fundamental flaws that make it very hard to consider using OM as a main navigation app.

First: it doesn’t seem to be able to use common informal names for places. If I search “Maccas” on GM, it correctly shows a number of McDonald’s restaurants, as well as Maccas competitors like Hungry Jacks. In OM I get a few places literally named “Macca’s”, followed by a bunch of much more tenuous results. No actual Maccas shows up.

Second, and probably more serious: it doesn’t tell me where something is. I typed in my street name, and understandably a number of results with that name came up. It tells me the city and state they’re in, but doesn’t get more fine-grained than that. With multiple of the same street in a given LGA, it is basically impossible to search by street address if the search result doesn’t narrow it down to suburb. This seems like an incredibly small fix to make, but also a mind boggling error to not already have.

  • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOP
    41·
    5 days ago

    My number one concern is that two out of the very first two things I tried doing worked spectacularly badly. It failed to turn up the expected results. If you read the post you’d know that of the two issues, the other one was the one I considered the worse of the two though.

    Should they be training the search index with urban dictionary just to be sure?

    If that’s what it takes? It’s not really my concern how it works, only that searching for X should turn up X, even if the way X was searched for doesn’t work with the sort of naive text match search that might work with a simple regex. Whether that’s typo detection or recognising ubiquitous alternative names.