Improve location search for "Lands End"

[graue]

In the default Bay Area-wide view, the first result for "Lands End" is not the popular hiking spot in SF, but some mountain peak in Santa Clara County(?!). This isn't obvious until you get directions because there is no address information beyond "Lands End" - it doesn't say where it's located.

In the above screenshot the second result "Lands End Beach" is in SF, but it doesn't say it's in SF, and "Lands End Beach" is probably not the name that people are looking for.

After zooming to San Francisco, the beach is the first result, and the Lands End Trail in SF also shows up, but there are still two mystery options:

The first mystery option (result 2) is Lands End in SF (seems to be the parking lot on the west end of the trail?), the second mystery option (result 3) is the one in Santa Clara County again.

This is an open-ended task to think about how to improve this and then do it, which may include any or all of the following potential solutions:

• Edit OSM to add more address information to the various "Lands End" objects. (Would only improve this specific case)
• Display what city/county a result is in even if the OSM object does not explicitly contain address information. (Could help give better results in general, not just Lands End - but how would we get this data? Might have to submit patches to Nominatim and/or Photon.)
• Change the ranking of location search results to better reflect the reality that (AFAIK) more people are going to be searching for the Lands End in SF. (No idea yet how the ranking criteria should change. This also sounds like a patch to Nominatim or Photon unless there's a parameter we could tweak)
• Should we have a totally different UI that displays location search results on a map while you're choosing between them? (Not sure how to design this so it fits on a phone display.)
• Maybe display more search results? We currently request 5 results (being deduped to 4 because in this case, two results have the same osm_id (they are different descriptions of the Lands End park)). If we used a larger limit, the 7th result, the "Lands End Trail" explicitly marked as being in San Francisco, would show up.
• Display the type of feature for each result. The Santa Clara County Lands End has osm_key=natural, osm_value=peak, indicating it's a mountain peak, while the SF Lands End that's probably the desired result has osm_key=boundary osm_value=national_park (also osm_key=leisure osm_value=park). Could we represent this in some useful way? Maybe "Lands End" with "Park" under it in small gray text, versus "Lands End" with "Mountain Peak" under it in small gray text?

[hcourt]

The first mystery option (result 2) is Lands End in SF (seems to be the parking lot on the west end of the trail?)

FYI this is the centroid of the relation that is Lands End

[graue]

Here are the raw JSON results for searching land's end, with our default Bay Area viewport, but modified to return 10 results

https://gist.github.com/graue/6930c50a43e1c8f74db54c30bb2351d3

[graue]

This case has gotten worse somehow as now the Lands End Trail in SF no longer says "San Francisco"

We now have icons:

But in this case they're a little misleading because the icon for "mountain peak" shows a hiker, even if there isn't a trail to that peak. Kind of makes it worse - you're looking for the trail and you see a hiker and select the mountain peak in Santa Clara County. Our icon set doesn't have a specific mountain peak icon (we could use this if the Creative Commons is compatible with our license).

It would help if we could get Photon to pass along more address information. If I look up R2142026 and N547985669 in Nominatim, they send back address.city: "San Francisco" and address.county: "Santa Clara County" respectively.

[graue]

I so far can't find any evidence other than OpenStreetMap and a user-submitted(?) object on Google Maps that the peak in Santa Clara County just outside Uvas Canyon Park is really called Lands End. Uvas Canyon Park's park map doesn't label it that...