[Brakenshire]

Have you tried the Scout App (which the article is about)? How does its search work?

I agree that geocoding has been a problem for OSM, especially for building numbers, where the data often isn't there. But on the software side there seems to be progress recently, for instance, here are two open-source geocoders released in the last few months:

Photon, made by Komoot: https://github.com/komoot/photon, used in production at http://www.komoot.de/suggest/?&hl=en

Pelias, made by Mapzen: http://stateofthemap.us/session/pelias/, live demo at http://mapzen.com/pelias/

On building numbers, we need geocoders which can interpolate between sparse data, and then use that system to highlight where the gaps are. People tend to add data to OSM when they're confident that it's actually being used, to its full extent. If there are a hundred buildings along a road, in theory you don't need to add many of them before you can get a very good idea of where an address might be.

[sitkack]

The map should communicate that it is interpolating the geocoded address by a circle of probability. Or even show known addresses and then an alpha blended triangle between them.

As you are saying, assistance from a mapping service need not be binary, just add some extra information and communicate cleanly the probability of result.

[bambax]

Interesting projects! I have tried to use the Mapquest geocoder API but for anything outside the US it's worse than useless. Will definitely check those out. It's great that they're based on Elastic Search since obviously geocoding is about full text search more than it is about "geo".

[kyriakos]

not even Google Maps have full building number information. at least not world wide - I've been to several European countries where building numbers are ignored in Google Map searches (sometimes you actually get no result at all if you include a building number)