Comment by gymbeaux

I did a dive into these services back in 2019 though some of these services in the article I’ve never heard of.

The three I spent a lot of time with were Azure Maps, MapQuest and of course OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim.

This was for a side project so the financial restrictions alone led me to settle on Nominatim. I had a dedicated Nominatim server running on a PowerEdge R620 in my closet on an array of SAS drives. Or maybe it was 500GB SATA SSDs. Anyway, I recall the normalization of addresses being a big pain point, although I was working with government data so that was going to be a pain point whether I used Nominatim or something “higher quality”.

I also recall becoming frustrated with some of these edits users would make to OSM (that went downstream to Nominatim’s data). Like Wikipedia, OSM’s data is often made worse by new editors who don’t understand the pragmatics of the map- for example, someone had gone through my neighborhood and traced the wooded area behind it, but did it based on satellite view and just followed the pattern of trees- even though that meant going well into people’s back yards that had only a tree or two. This really should have been a property line tracing.