The rewritten search frontend of Nominatim has just been rolled out on OSM’s main instance https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org. Give it a try.

After half a year of development, the completely rewritten frontend for Nominatim is now ready for production. While it may still look the same on the outside, a lot has changed with the implementation, especially for forward search. It closes as many as 10 outstanding issues, some as old as 5 years. If you want to know more about what has changed in the frontend, read the previous posts about frontend renovations and improving search.

Most of the API has been ported as is to the new frontend. However, the new implementation is slightly more strict and some long deprecated features are now gone. Here are the most important changes:

  • HTTP requests must now use the GET method and make sure the URL is properly percentage-encoded. POST requests or queries in raw UTF-8 are no longer accepted.
  • The osm_type and osm_id parameters for reverse have been removed. Use the lookup endpoint instead.
  • URLs with additional slashes (https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse/?lat=5.45&lon=-34,5 or https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search/MyPlace?format=json) are no longer accepted. Remove the additional slashes and use the q parameter for searches.
  • Search along a route no longer works.
  • Mixing structured and unstructured search now raises an error. (See this comment for context.)

Please give the new frontend a try. Geocoding isn’t an exact science. It will take a while before the new algorithm is tuned to give the best possible results. Your input can be helpful for the process. If you find that some searches work worse than before, don’t hesitate to open an issue in the Nominatim issue tracker.

Many thanks to NGI Zero who are funding this work on improving Nominatim.