flatfox-rs VS Nominatim

Interesting article: I did something similar but for Zürich (finding a low-price, but good apartment there is almost impossible).

I did follow a different approach though, and reverse engineered the APIs of the most common rental listing websites here.

I didn't publish the code (or better said, I didn't make it public), but it's similar to yours. Instead of SQLite I used a PostGis database where I stored the apartments with their point to point public transport distance from my office (pre-covid search). I did it in Rust.

Whilst the application is not available to the public (yet), all of the libraries I've created are now available.

I should have both a Rust and a Golang version for most / all of them.

On a side note, I did a similar project (scraper + visualizer / search) for finding a job for my girlfriend by scraping LinkedIn, Xing and a couple of other local job posting websites.

[0]: https://github.com/denysvitali/sbb-api-rs

[1]: https://github.com/denysvitali/homegate-rs

[2]: https://github.com/denysvitali/flatfox-rs

[3]: https://github.com/denysvitali/go-sbb-api

You can simply use geopy API to get longitude and latitude from address. geopy includes geocoder classes for the OpenStreetMap Nominatim, Google Geocoding API (V3), and many other geocoding services. The full list is available on the Geocoders doc section. Geocoder classes are located in geopy.geocoders. Here…

I have had a lot of "fun" with this feature in the past. It has earned a permanent place in my setup script:

ALTER SYSTEM SET jit=off;

Basically a performance blackhole for more complex queries. Most OSM related projects disable it straight away as it only creates headaches.

https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/pull/2559

Because osm.org and OsmAnd use different search engines. On osm.org it uses the Nominatim geocoder which is good at parsing addresses the way we are used to writing them. It is also running on a server with a lot of storage and memory resources. OsmAnd is built for offline use so it can't use Nominatim and has much more limited computing resources available to it. It is searching through the map files locally on your phone and however they have chosen to implement that search algorithm seems to perform poorly on addresses.

Ako skupa s adresama imaš i njihove lokacije možeš i koristiti gotov geocoder (e.g. Nominatim je free i koristi OSM podatke, možeš i deployati svoju instancu), pa iz rezultata naći geometrijski najbližu adresu koju imaš.

Then implement a use case. We are going to use Geocoding use case with Nominatim provider. But you can, of course, use a different provider. Copy the example code into your server.js file and make a few changes, so we can send the information we will receive from the user:

There are reasons why this tech was developed: because GPS can take a long time to sync up to the satellites, because GPS often doesn't work indoors, because your phone can keep a local cache of locations, and so you have the ability to find places by name or address (Geocoding) using nominatim ( https://nominatim.org )

and nominatim which does the geocoding/reverse geocoding: https://nominatim.org/

Then it depends on how the location data is conveyed in the group chat. If it's a text message you need to parse it and possibly use a mapping service to do geocoding. Eg. convert "22 Main Street" or "upper Brooklyn" into GPS coordinates. Besides Google Maps API you can maybe use OpenStreetMaps via Nominatim. If it's something more like "we just passed John's house" then you need to figure out how to write some logic to determine a location from that. Or maybe they just used the WhatsApp location share feature, then you probably don't need mapping at all.