(old) Legacy Search ist lost

[pebogufi]

is this intended ? There is no more item in menu and no more option in OsmAnd development. Why did you remove it, until now it is much better than "new" search ! Peter

Version (WITHOUT legacy search) 3.2.0.#25997. 2018-10-01 Version (~last With legacy search) 3.2.0.#25959. 2018-09-24

[Zahnstocher]

Yes, it is: https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/commit/0ae307dbf67cc379eff7d01d012d7052880d9566

[vshcherb]

We have some hard time to maintain that codebase and this legacy code stops some refactoring. We definitely don't want to package it in the release version. As of today it was used less than than 0.1% people, so we make a decision to delete it.

[hvdwolf]

How do you get that 0.1% statistic? Via Google statistics? or is there "something" hidden in the code that sends user statistics to the osmand site? Although I personally regret your decision, as I switch back and forth between both search options depending on demand (free search sometimes delivers way too many results), I don't want to fight the decision to stop the removal, especially if it gives problems in the rest of the code. But I'm interested in the 0.1% statistics figure

[vshcherb]

Statistics is enabled on OsmAnd Free version, we don't know anything about OsmAnd~ and OsmAnd+. Obviously people can disable statistics on free and we also don't know anything about them, though for us it is the only source of information.

[vshcherb]

Developers don't maintain it properly and I personally not against that code, I'm mostly against to have it on wide audience such as OsmAnd though I don't know solution to keep the codebase out of OsmAnd itself.

Please feel free to comment your use cases and be polite and I hope in many of them we can find what's missing in current search. I personally believe that this step will help us to collect more feedback about address search and fix what we are missing in current Search > Address (obviously it is a bit different than old one).

[david-ukr]

Legacy search is very important for me and if you remove it this is a reason to move to another app with offline maps such as Locus Map. Standard search does not do what I need. Typical use case: I am looking for a street in Bangkok, Thailand and I am currently in Germany. The street has various different spellings, but I am sure of the first three characters, for example “kha”. No problem offline with legacy search. With the new search, Osmand takes a long time to list several Thai restaurants called Bangkok near to where I live in Germany and seems to need an internet connection to search anything more than 10 km away from my current location. Or maybe I am missing something?

I also regularly use the Search GPS location feature without an internet connection. Before removing legacy search completely, I noticed the following detrimental change after a recent update: I have very many My Places, and if you search for My Places in legacy search, they used to be listed by distance from current location and are now listed alphabetically, making them much harder to find (much more scrolling is necessary).

[david-ukr]

BTW: They are listed alphabetically in the My Places menu, of course. This is to be expected.

[hvdwolf]

See also https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/osmand/z4vSEl0vXkc for a number of reasons why the classic hierarchic search is still useful.

First off: For me the new search works 95%, but that is because I use OsmAnd for hiking and cycling where the (search) distances are relatively short. For that OsmAnd is simply the best and the new search almost always sufficient. So the new search is indeed my preferred search, but it is not 100% waterproof. (sorry: I still consider OsmAnd too slow for car navigation).

We all know that some street names are very common and used in a lot of cities. This results in lots of search results unless you type out the full address (and 100% correct) in which case the "old" hierarchic search is just as fast.

In case you search for something with a very common name some 200 km or more away, you also get loads and loads of results which are close by (like david-ukr also mentions). In that case a hierarchic search (POI search) works much better.

And referring back to the 0.1% usage from Osmand Free: I think most of the legacy search users are using OsmAnd~ and OsmAnd+, although I have no single fact to prove that of course.

[pebogufi]

@david-ukr

.... I have very many My Places, and if you search for My Places in legacy search, they used to be listed by distance from current location and are now listed alphabetically, making them much harder to find (much more scrolling is necessary).

see https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/5524

[jfburke3]

I kinda want the legacy search back, too, but I think the devs have done a good job by including some of its capability in the new search if you change to the Address tab on the search screen. Across the top you have History, Categories, and Address. Selecting Address lets you do a search that is very similar to how the old Legacy Search worked.

[david-ukr]

Osmand+ 3.2.2 Map language and Osmand GUI: English, Samsung tablet, Android 5

I use Osmand+ on a daily basis, also for car navigation, where it is fast enough for me. I have some issues with texts of the spoken navigation in English but this is the wrong thread. I also use Osmand+ for aid projects in Africa. I do a bit of OSM mapping too.

With the new search it is necessary to enter the full city name and then the full street name 100% correctly. Not necessary with legacy search, the first 2 - 3 characters are enough and then pick from the list. Example of new search (I just tried this): Hannover Königstraße will find Königstraße (but the search results list shows this as Hanover Konigstrasse with the English GUI) But Hannover Königstrasse will not find this street. Hannover Königstraß is also unsucessful.

Oschersleben Friedrichstrasse will find Friedrichstrasse in Oschersleben but Oschersleben Friedrichstraße will not. I thought that ß should be replaced with ss in Neue Rechtschreibung but I am not sure if this applies to street names. Anyway, plenty of scope for confusion.

The requirement for the full street name 100% correctly is a big problem in Thailand for example, where there are several different spellings of Thai street names using Latin characters. With legacy search, just type in 3 characters and pick from the list.

If the map is centered on Hannover, where I live, and I search for Bangkok (or Bangkok Thailand) I get no results (even with Online Search) although the Thailand map is installed. To get results I need to scroll the map manually 10,000 km first. Luckily I am able to find Bangkok manually on a world map. How do you scroll near to a village in Switzerland which you don’t know and are not sure of the spelling. Best to use Google Maps.

0.1% usage: How do you know this if I am mostly offline.

[hvdwolf]

I did some further analysis and I think there is a bug.

Next Monday I have to go to "Am Kreisforst 1, Meppen". No matter whether I type "Meppen, Am Kreisforst 1", "Am Kreisforst 1, Meppen" with or without the "," or adding germany/Deutschland before or after, it still doesn't find anything.

When using the Address search, it is the same. When using Address search "Start from City", it finds "Meppen" easy enough. When I then start typing "Am K" it doesn't find anything. However, when I start typing "Kreis", it does find "Am Kreisforst". Obviously the space is the culprit here.

Now, when I simply type "Meppen Kreis" in the search without even selecting Address, it does work as well. Again: the search doesn't handle spaces correct and sometimes it works (like in "Den Haag") when not many "other" matches are found.

Edit: Now that I finally understand this, I see that I can now find some other "space containing" addresses as well, which I could not find before.

But please try "Den Haag Machiel Vrijenhoeklaan". You simply can't find it. Even with "my new acquired knowledge" it is hard to find. When I go to "Search from city", using "Den Haag" and then "Machiel....", it does work. You still get the address, but this is a bit clumsy. In legacy search it worked very structured and you always found what you needed.

But the "space" issue is the biggest hurdle. Now that I know that "bug", I can find, by trial and error, everything I could not find in the past.

Edit2: I think that "space issue" should be added to http://osmand.net/features/find-something-on-map

[david-ukr]

Another example of Search problems due to different spellings

The city of Zaporozhye in the Ukraine (which I visited several times) has two different spellings in cyrillic, one for the Russian alphabet and one for the Ukrainian alphabet, which is slightly different. Using Latin characters you can find about 12 different spellings online. One of the universities there spells the city as Zaporizhzhya and Wikipedia Germany spells it Saporischschja. The Osmand download map is labelled Ukraine Zaporizhia Oblast (Oblast = region) but the Osmand map itself spells it as Zaporizhzhia. All of the versions start with Zapor or Sapor.

With Osmand search, you need to enter the city name in full and correctly before you enter the street name. Depending how you spell the city name you get a different list of streets, because OSM is not very standardized in cases like this. Try it. With legacy search you only need to enter Zapor and then pick a spelling from the list. Less typing to repeat if you choose the wrong one.

I plan to downgrade my Osmand+ so I can carry on with my work. Luckily I have a backup of the apk’s.

[Max1234-Ita]

I'm afraid this post is a bit long... Sorry, guys :)

I'm sorry too that legacy search has been removed (and of course I'm using Osmand+). Actually, the new search seems to operate in a similar way: you enter the first letters of the place you want and the search begins... BUT here's the big problem: search is in some way "centered" on the place where the map is currently pointed. If you search for a spot quite far away, the risk is to see lots of results, so many that you are unable to even find what you're looking for.

Just to make an example: I have installed all the 20 maps for Europe/Italy. I'm now near Milano (Milan) and just need to center the map on Roma (Rome). I tap the search icon in the map screen, go to the Address tab and just type in: "Roma": search immediately starts and the displayed results are sorted by distance, starting from the nearest. The output is something like this:

I stopped making screenshots when I reached results about 15 Km away; unfortunately, Rome is as far as 500 Km from my current position and I should have scrolled the list a lot more before I was able to see the correct item: "Rome - City".

Most probably, those many results are due to the fact that the typed string is only 4 characters long and in Italy we have a lot of places with "roma" in their name (consider, however, that in Italy you can also find even shorter names, i. e. the Po river).

In my opinion, the new search algorithm is good but it needs some improvement: in particular, some option should be introduced in order to sort results also hierachically: i. e. Cities should come first, then towns/villages, streets/squares, rivers/lakes/valleys and POI/favorites, otherwise, the risk is that the User loses its way among a very long list of results.

Just to insist on that point: I've also noticed that in the Address search area there's the option to Start search from city: "Nice", I said to myself, "let's try and see what happens".

Well, I typed in "Roma"... and this is what I got:

The list is now sorted alphabetically, but to find the requested item I have to scrool the list down again: if I have counted well, Roma -City is item #22 in the list, well beyond the "first screen visibility" (my Galaxy S5, which has a 5.2" display, can show up to 9 list items at once).

For sure, being able to hierarchically sort the results or to filter them, by only displaying the needed categories (i. e. CIties and Towns) would have simplified my search a lot.

Thanks for your attention, Massimo

P.S. Just another remark: in the search pane, I haven't seen any way to offline-search for mountains, rivers, etc. Hope it's possible...

[pebogufi]

Using the example of @Max1234-Ita searching for "roma" should find

• first exact matches
• then partial matches, also if they are before exact matches in alphabetical order example:

Roma (first!) Bagnara di Romagna Ba...

[scaidermern]

I also encountered the issue described by @Max1234-Ita, see #5469. Partial matches should have a lower priority as exact matches.

[pebogufi]

There was a hint of @vshcherb "In order to find exact match you need to Hit enter on the keyboard or space" https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/5469#issuecomment-394160400 I search for "metz" with trailing space and got this list. The metz I searched for is on pos 6.

[vshcherb]

First of all, please compare "Old address search" with "New address search" (don't compare with search all, obviously it brings too much wrong results). New address search is structured by City > Street (without any POI). 2nd please use space or hit "search" (OK) button on the keyboard to use exact match.

[vshcherb]

https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/6149

[scaidermern]

please use space or hit "search" (OK) button on the keyboard to use exact match.

To me this behavior is not really obvious. Do you think it would be a good idea to add this text to the search menu as a hint? I think it will improve the search experience for many users.

[Max1234-Ita]

Just tried searching with the trailing space and now Rome-City result is #5 in the alphabetically-sorted list:

@scaidermern : the hint on search menu would be useful, but this sounds more like a workaround, not a solution.

The everyday's street-user just expects to see obvious things first (read: exact match first, if any, then all the other stuff)...

IMO, the approach proposed by @vshcherb in issue #6149 is way more logical.

BR Massimo

[kaleissin]

I rarely use osmand (osmand+ only) for navigation, I use it primarily for planning trips. I make favorites for the places I'll stay, the entry point (airport, train station), places I'll see. The old search worked brilliantly for that, except for Brussels (because you first have to guess and pick the village/subarea, if it's not the old town) and England (because there, post code is king. A street is relative to post code, not city.)

I've been using the "Start search from city" in this version, but it is flakey and not to mention slow. The UI still needs some work. It also needs an error message when a city cannot be found because that region haven't been downloaded. "X not found within Y kms. Have you downloaded the region it is in?"

Lucky that this update did not happen while I was traveling. When the old search was hidden the first time I was traveling, to a place unfamiliar to me, and having the UI change as it did was downright scary. It's not something you do in a minor release! I wound up spending some time at the hotel frantically searching for a fix, and luckily found info about Legacy Search in #3261.

[inovitae]

I also strongly doubt the 0.1% people using the legacy search. I would estimate more 90% of people did use the old legacy search. I have never used the new search as it is more complicated and in many cases completely useless as seen in the posts above. With the fast growing number of POI it is more than ever important to restrict the search and Country/Town/Street etc. was really the easiest way than the new address search... As an IT professional I cannot believe it is so difficult to keep a good search option... at least add the selection of the country that avoids to move first on the map to the right region and than type the city...

BR Christoph

[scaidermern]

If the old search is so hard to maintain (why exactly?) then maybe you can use the new search and add optional filters for cities, streets etc. This could make the new search behave similar to the old search.

[Max1234-Ita]

+1 New search isn't so bad, as I already said, it only lacks some flexibility.

Have a nice day, Max - Italy

Il giorno dom 21 ott 2018 alle ore 11:04 Alexander Heinlein < notifications@github.com> ha scritto:

If the old search is so hard to maintain (why exactly?) then maybe you can use the new search and add optional filters for cities, streets etc. This could make the new search behave similar to the old search.

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[sonora]

Even after the latest improvements, the major problem with our new search is still to find exact matches: If you have a PRECISE address (meaning you know the exact street name and in which town it is), like 'Main St, San Francisco', it is still almost impossible to find it using our new search in the middle of all related search hits. (Try it! :) )

This can likely only be solved by a hierarchical address search, like many car nav systems offer it. Instead of the complex different address search options now, we could have an address search template (similar to how we offer it for the coordinate search) containing all different address fields: On this we now the category of every word the user enters and never guess what the street vs. town name is or what the house number vs.post code is). You fill out the fields you know, then hit 'Search', then the corresponding results are displayed in strict relevance order, exact matches first, then fuzzy results.

[osmvermesser]

Hello,

I am in favor of the search being integrated back into Osmand because I can find places better especially when traveling abroad if you do not know exactly how to write them.

Other languages often have special letters that I do not know as a stranger. This allows me to better visually search in a list.

In addition, the old list offers the possibility to find street crosses if there are no numbers. Again, a visual search is very helpful.

It would be for me a point AGAINST OsmAnd when the search is no longer available.

In addition, it would even be desirable if this does not have to be added, but would be available as another register in the "normal" search.

reagards Jan

German: Hallo,

ich bin dafür das die Suche wieder in OsmAND integriert wird, weil ich Orte besser finden kann insbesondere auf Reisen im Ausland wenn man nicht genau weiß, wie diese geschrieben werden.

Andere Sprachen haben oftmals spezielle Buchstaben mit denen ich mich als Fremder nicht auskenne. So kann ich in einer Liste besser visuell suchen.

Darüber hinaus bietet die alte Liste die Möglichkeit auch Straßenkreuzugen zu finden, wenn keine Nummern vorhanden sind. Auch hier ist eine visuelle Suche sehr hilfreich.

Es wäre für mich ein Punkt GEGEN OsmAnd, wenn die Suche nicht mehr zur Verfügung steht.

Darüber hinaus wäre es sogar wünschenswert, wenn diese nicht hinzugeschaltet werden muss sondern als weiterer Register in der "normalen" Suche zur Verfügung stehen würde.

Gruß Jan

[sonora]

Please note that it is 'sort of' integrated, but it is not very obvious, as follows:

• Go to the 'address'tab
• Select'Start search from city'
• Search the city/town/hamlet first. You will even see a list of cities/towns if you wait a bit, which is filtered as you type
• After selecting the city you will see the list of all streets, and can again start typing to narrow it down
• After selecting one you will see the list of house numbers and/or street intersections.

It is just not obvious it works like that.

Soecial characters: Just ignore any accents, Umlaute etc. and use the standard Latin alphabet, you will always find all related words.

[vshcherb]

Even after the latest improvements, the major problem with our new search is still to find exact matches: If you have a PRECISE address (meaning you know the exact street name and in which town it is), like 'Main St, San Francisco', it is still almost impossible to find it using our new search in the middle of all related search hits. (Try it! :) )

Indeed some use cases won't work though in this issue we are not arguing about perfect solution for 1-line search which we want to have and it should be separate issue. This issue is discussing whether new "not-obvious" address search (tab search in address) could replace the legacy search. To be honest I feel they are 99% functionally identical except 1 thing, the search on "Address" Tab is not that obviously hierarchical but it in reality it is hierarchical as the legacy.

So I could understand there is an issue to get used to this new search but this is the situation new users deal with anyway. So we should get better the new search and keep it functionally the same. So please focus what doesn't functionally works in new address search vs legacy address search.

[pebogufi]

What I would like to have is a filter for country or region before entering city, like filtering the map in lecacy search.

[Stormi1]

In the "new search" you must first click on the magnifying glass, then on "address", then on "search streets in place" and then enter the street name. Is it possible to place everything up to the location selection as a function on the quick access so that you only have to enter the street name? Or is it perhaps possible as an alternative to offer the old search as an addon? Legacy search is very important to me!

[david-ukr]

In Osmand it is possible to have overlapping maps, for example Germany and Lower Saxony. If the maps are from different dates, how does the standard search know which map to use, if for example a road has been moved or the name has changed? With legacy search you choose the map you want to use.

It is also possible to make your own custom maps in standard Osmand format (obf), for example with extract.bbbike.org (easy to use) and OsmAndMapCreator. You can even create raster maps as tiles in sqlite format using MAPC2MAPC. For example, you can scan a paper map and convert it for use in Osmand as an overlay or underlay (see the YouTube videos from Bart Eisenberg). If you are using custom maps, with legacy search you can manually choose the map you want to use. This does not appear possible with the standard search. Please explain how to choose the map.

[rlaggren]

I use OsmAnd for planning. I need to easily find stuff thousands of mile away. The Search/Addresses/City-first options displays dozens of unwanted results and it ONLY displays them for 60mi around my present location.

I have very hard time seeing how this type of behavior can be considered OK. I'm sorry. It just seems very very silly and it's extremely frustrating.

FWIW somebody above suggested providing a "form" or screen with some labeled search fields which could be filled out. That sounds like an excellent idea toward making OsmAnd search usable. Another idea would be to provide an option on the search entry (whatever form that takes) to only "hit" items STARTING with the search string. IOW, drop all items merely containing the search string.

Thanks for your attention. I really believe in opensource software and I have purchased OsmAnd+.

Rufus

[Max1234-Ita]

Another useful feature would be to allow the user to define his/her preferred search type => the one to be shown as soon as the search menu is opened... Maybe the last used one? :-)

Cheers, Max

[david-ukr]

I have been using Osmand+ for a long time and and I also use it regularly for planning journeys thousands of miles away from my present location. I can understand rlaggren‘s frustation about the present search system.

The former, so-called Legacy Search was an unpublished feature which you could enable up to Osmand 3.2.1 or 3.2.2 in Plugins > Osmand Development > Settings which activated an additional menu item „Legacy Search“ where you could search incrementally just like in dedicated sat nav devices such as Tom Tom. You first choose the map or country you want from the list followed by the town, the street and the house number or road intersection (if street numbers are missing in OpenStreetMap).

Legacy Search worked extremely well but unfortunately it was removed from Osmand for obscure reasons. It was above all ideal if you were not sure of the spelling of a town or street, for example. You start off with the initial letter such as „S“ and scroll down the list of hits.

There were menus for additional search types such as POI, GPS location, Favourites and History. If you searched on Favourites, it used to list your favourites in increasing distance from the map center (not alphabetically, which it currently does). This is very important if you have stored lots of favourite locations in different countries.

Osmand is practically useless to me without Legacy Search, but luckily I kept a copy of the setup file Osmand+ 3.2.1.apk and switched off auto-update in Android for Osmand. The setup file would let me reinstall (side load) the old Osmand version 3.2.1 if it got updated by mistake.

Osmand 3.2.1 still works fine with the latest map files. I would also like the option to turn off auto-centering. Right now the map jumps back to my present location if I restart Osmand (just like Google Maps). Other map apps such as Locus Map do not do this Cheers, David

[scaidermern]

I fully agree with @david-ukr. The legacy search was incredibly useful if you don't know the exact spelling of the address, for example if you are in a foreign country. Also it returned a lot less silly results compared to the current search. The current search isn't bad at all but it should be possible to use the "legacy" search as an alternative approach. It doesn't really matter if this is really the old legacy search or if the new search gets some filter options for city, street and so on.

[osmvermesser]

Hi! I only can say yes to the words of Alexander!

---

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blog.tappenbeck.net

Mein Verein für die Spur Z

http://www.efs-badschwartau.de

OpenStreetMap (OSM) - das FREIE Kartenprojekt

http://www.openstreetmap.de

Am 19. Feb. 2019, 06:51, um 06:51, Alexander Heinlein notifications@github.com schrieb:

I fully agree with @david-ukr. The legacy search was incredibly useful if you don't know the exact spelling of the address, for example if you are in a foreign country. Also it returned a lot less silly results compared to the current search. The current search isn't bad at all but it should be possible to use the "legacy" search as an alternative approach. It doesn't really matter if this is really the old legacy search or if the new search gets some filter options for city, street and so on.

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[sonora]

Have you tested the workaround https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/6118#issuecomment-433803085 I discovered and posted on Oct. 29 above?

I often had the very same issues described by @david-ukr, @scaidermern, and @osmvermesser above, but now find it a viable workaround for my purposes. Maybe all we need to do is somehow make it more obvious, perhaps on a separate tab.

[lmrblk]

I'm adding my voice to good old legacy search. In most cases I know address (country, city, street) and in that case was legacy search very useful.

[vshcherb]

Closing issue as deprecated, old search won't get back anymore

[Max1234-Ita]

The new search is working well, indeed (finally :) ) Thank you for your work!