Athens: unexpected search result order

[sotpapathe]

What did you search for?

Athens

What result did you get?

Athens, Clarke County, Georgia, United States Administrative

What result did you expect?

Athens, Municipality of Athens, Regional Unit of Central Athens, Attica, 105 57, Greece City

Further details

The capital of Greece is only the 7th result, after the following:

1. Athens, Clarke County, Georgia, United States Administrative
2. Athens County, Ohio, United States Administrative
3. Athens, Athens Township, Athens County, Ohio, 45701, United States Administrative
4. Athens, Henderson County, Texas, 75751, United States Administrative
5. Athens, Limestone County, Alabama, 35613, United States Administrative
6. West Athens, Los Angeles County, California, United States Administrative

Given that Athens, Greece is a capital, the first place named "Athens" and that it probably has a larger population than all the above results combined, I would expect it to be first.

[mtmail]

I notice that https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/details.html?osmtype=N&osmid=441183&class=place says Wikipedia Calculated: en:Aktiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktiki) while both node (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/441183) and relation (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/4477553) point to the Greek wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktiki is a redirect to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens

[lonvia]

That's a result of reranking and somewhat wanted. If you search without any language preferences, then the Greek Athens comes out as 'Αθήνα' while all the other results come out as 'Athens'. The latter is a much better fit to your search query. It should work though, when you set your language preference to English:

https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html?q=Athens&accept-language=en

but it doesn't. So somewhere there is a bug with reranking and result localisation. Might be a side-effect of #3813. Investigating.

[sotpapathe]

In case it helps, I noticed this behavior only recently (maybe 3 weeks or so?) when using fingr, which uses nominatim for location lookup. Up until then queries for "athens" would return Athens, Greece as the first result.

Thank you for looking into this!

[lonvia]

I was expecting that we are reranking with the language-preferences in mind but that actually didn't get implemented during the switch to Python.

What we need here is to change the collection for rewording words to take into account the default language and translations. That would be similar to what #3995 already does for the country names. Only here it has to collect the names from all address parts.

@Itz-Agasta, maybe you are interested in doing a follow up PR?

[Itz-Agasta]

@Itz-Agasta, maybe you are interested in doing a follow up PR?

Yep i got this... I’ve been drafting another PR over the past few days. once it’s finished, I’ll definitely take a look at this.