search API

[tomay]

The search box at the top of the page uses https://search.mapzen.com/v1/search which no longer exists

┆Issue is synchronized with this Asana task

[danrademacher]

Can we just replace this with Bing or Nominatim?

[tomay]

A few notes on the transition from Mapzen to Nominatim:

• This is a complex search input! It includes a typeahead (on keyup, prior to submit), which populates a list of results for selection. Typing "REI" for example, shows you all buildings with REI in the property_name. Same for building id and address.
• If, on the other hand, you type an address (or anything else) and then hit "enter" (there is no other way to submit that I could find), it hits the remote geocoder defined in search.url in seattle.json. From there, it looks for an exact match on the search.terms listed in seattle.json. These are property_name, reported_address and property_id. If any of these match a building in the database, then a pin is added to the map on the lat-lng for that building. The user then has select the building to open the map popup, view a report, etc.
• If there is no exact match between the entered term and those three fields, then search finds the closest 10 buildings to the lat-lng of the entered address, and presents those to the user as typeahead results.

Additional notes

• There is another instance of search.mapzen.com/v1/search hardcoded in address_search.js. I have not discovered how or where this is used, and am ignoring this for now. If it is still used, it is definitely not working.
• Mapzen search returned a property called "region", and this was used to match returned geolocated "features" (lat-lngs) against address_search_regional_context from seattle.json. There is no equivalent in Nominatim, but there is "address.city". I'm not sure this will always match "regional_context" for other implementations of this app, but it does here, where address_search_regional_context is "Seattle".