Geocoding is a problem that needs to be solved well once, and open for everyone to use.
Since you seem to share Nominatim's goals, why have you decided to create your own solution rather than work to improve Nominatim's weaknesses? Genuinely curious.
What makes you think we will not be working with and improving nominatim, or many of the other good open tools and datasets (for example geonames to mention just one of several)? Sorry if I've implied that.
For some context, my company, Lokku, has sponsored many a SotM (including the first one in 2007, and we're sponsoring SotM-EU next month), has repeatedly donated what I like to think are significant sums to the OSM foundation, and this year our company xmas gift to clients was a donation on their behalf to HOT-OSM. We're members of the UK's Open Data Institute, were one of the first companies to move to using OSM tiles in place of Google, run #geomob (a geo innovation meetup in London, hope to see you at our next one which happens to be tomorrow), and actively invest in geo start ups like SplashMaps. So I think I can safely say: we get it.
We've looked at nominatim and contributed to the code. Like any complex codebase it has strengths and weaknesses. It is a significant improvement on what came before, congrats to all who contributed. It does not follow from that that all effort at inventing a better future has to fall under the nominatim umbrella.
My question is not should we try to build a better geocoding service (be it an extension of nominatim, a replacement of nominatim, or whatever) It is what would it look like?
I guess we just differ on philosophy. I think a diversity of approaches leads to more positive outcomes. Why limit ourselves to the structure and mental paths that are already there? In the same way that OSM has many editors, each with strengths and weaknesses, why should it have only one geocoder? That said, rest assured we have no plans to fork nominatim.
I don't think we differ on philosophy... clearly there are different geocoders which are competing and I am interested to know more about what you're doing. That's why I'm asking about your motivation.
If you think the problems with Nominatim cannot be overcome within Nominatim, what makes you think that you can do as good a job and overcome those problems without Nominatim?
That doesn't fully make sense to me yet.
I've annoyed you enough, sorry :) Thanks for your patience.
Nominatim is not built to handle autocomplete, which is a requirement for many consumer apps. Thus the focus on Lucene, where you get that for free, instead of building your own fulltext search on top of PostGIS.
Since you seem to share Nominatim's goals, why have you decided to create your own solution rather than work to improve Nominatim's weaknesses? Genuinely curious.