Reverse Geocoding - results look different

[nacho02]

Hello,

for the last couple of moths I've had different looking results when reverse geocoding my files.

Whereas in the past I would get Country, State, City and Location without any postcodes, postcodes are now visible and what is worse, I am seeing a lot of instances where the city if not actually being displayed, but rather a street name, or company name. See example attached.

This was visible with IMATCH 2023 and IMATCH 2025. 

AFAIK I can mask the fields as to remove the postcode, but I'm not getting the city :-( 

Anyone else has seen this?

Thanks
Ignacio


 

[Mario]

Your screen shot shows no city names at all. Looks more like an advertisement...?

When I enter your coordinates, I get the same data, no city, just an ad for this company?
When  move the file maker a few meters away, I get



Did you try that?

[axel.hennig]

Yes, I also had this in the last few weeks sometimes (with company names). I'm pretty sure it is/was a geonames issue an definitely not an IMatch issue.

[nacho02]

Hi,

yes. It does look more like a Geonames issue to me, to be honest. And yes.... no city. I thought I might find someone who has experienced the same issue. I'll google and see if there are known issues with Geonames.

Thanks!

[nacho02]

If I may bring this back.. I can't seem to get this to work.

Mario, I did try this and I got similar results, company names instead of city.

Here two files on this.

[nacho02]

and if I use the original coordinates and check them up in geonemes.org I get the attached file. No trace of company names... I do not understand how to bring this back to normal.

Any help as to where to start will be appreciated, even if I do not think this is an IMATCH issue. Maybe the API?

Thanks!

[Mario]

IMatch can only display what geonames returns. It does not make up the name.
Change the coordinates slightly and retry.
Consider using Google or HERE.

[Stenis]

For what it´s worth:

I have used Google Map API from the beginning but made an effort yesterday to use something else because I wanted to try to support another source instead of Google after seeing a film on Youtube about Google´s lack of search result - showing sponsored just links instead of search results.

Well I activated Geonames but it is soooo... much more inferior that it is useless outside densely populated areas. I live in a sparsely populated country and here it is useless. So I reverted to Google again BUT I have found OpenStreetMap far more detailed in many cases than my Google maps so now I use Google for Reverse Geocoding but with OpenStreetMap :-).

I have seen these empty Cityand Location-fields too.

Surprisingly OpenStreetMap has been a far better chioce both in Sweden, Spain and Morocco for example.

[Mario]

OSM is especially good for hikers, cyclists and "the wild".

[Stenis]

I have used it even in a place like Addis Ababa Ethiopia where there were no street signs at all in 1978. OpenStreetMap was just so much better than Googles alternatives when I tagged those images with iMatch.

At least for me it was a really big eye opener that their maps are so much better in most ways than Google's. Before this I saw Google as "the" geomap-company - but not any more :-)

[Mario]

Google aims at cars and "shopping". OSM is maintained and filled by volunteers, from all over the world. Everybody can add new tracks and locations, even from the tiniest backwater hiking trail.

[jch2103]

This isn't up-do-date, but my past experience is that, because OSM depends on local volunteers, the results can differ significantly from country to country. For example, I found several years ago that OSM results in France were less complete in rural areas than in Germany or Australia. I assume data everywhere is more complete now.