Definitely a good to have service. Definitely feel that updating data is the biggest challenge. We have something similar in my hometown based of Edmonton based on linksf.
The other thing we're currently concentrating on is improving / tuning the quality of the search results, when you have a large, complex data set that feeds to many applications it requires careful consideration and ongoing reevaluation to tune the results and to make sure what people are expecting to find with their queries.
We can release to production via our CI / CD pipeline as often as we need, so if any adjustments are required outside of the data itself it's trivial for us to release new code (images), on one of our other apps we were releasing to production over 40 times a day as features and fixes were developed.
You're right about the data quality, it's a huge job and we have a fantastic team of people who work to keep the data up to date.
Another big challenge is trying to provide useful results in areas (especially remote areas) where we're either missing good data, or where there simply aren't any nearby services. Australia is a huge country and population density tends to be concentrated in a few places, but with a lot of smaller towns and cities scattered about, which can make finding geographically relevant results really difficult.
As one of the developers on LinkSF I'd also love to share ideas. We're about to do some serious rewriting after finding out our backend is going away. Really great to see new projects happening in this area of service!
The other thing we're currently concentrating on is improving / tuning the quality of the search results, when you have a large, complex data set that feeds to many applications it requires careful consideration and ongoing reevaluation to tune the results and to make sure what people are expecting to find with their queries.
We can release to production via our CI / CD pipeline as often as we need, so if any adjustments are required outside of the data itself it's trivial for us to release new code (images), on one of our other apps we were releasing to production over 40 times a day as features and fixes were developed.