As well as adding postcode search support recently, we’ve this week we’ve upgraded the general street/place finding system (called a ‘geocoder’).
We’ve moved to using the new Nominatim system (technical details for those interested) by Brian Quinion – thanks to him and anyone else involved in that project.
Some tips for quicker searches are:
- If the map is zoomed out, ideally include a city name as well, so that it knows what area to look in
- If you do specify a city, add a comma before it, e.g. “York Street, Cambridge” rather than just “York Street Cambridge”
- Note that lower-case text works the same as Capitalised Text.
In terms of our own implementation, the area you are in is automatically added when the map shown covers less than 18km across (zoom level 12 or higher).
The search-as-you-type implementation is one we heavily adapted from Search-as-you-Type on Google Code. We will release the front-end and back-end code in due course once we’ve done some more tidying to separate it out from other parts of CycleStreets, as we move towards open-sourcing the code.
