[IIAB] geodata search results

[Joel Steres]

tl;dr; Basically I'm looking for recommendations on good sources for
quality, free geodata.

Currently, our geodata comes from the allCountries index from
geonames.org. The quality of the map search results, indexing simply
on the name, is poor.  Part of this is due to not having a suitable
scoring algorithm. Part of this is due to not smartly querying
multiple fields in the data.  I thought population might serve as a
crude scoring field, but the allCountries index seems to show all
populations as 0.  Oddly the cities1000.txt (exclusively cities with
populations >1000 people) from geonames.org does include population
sizes.  Since the cities1000 dataset is much smaller, the apparent
relevance of the search results is better but lacks essential features
beyond cities.  Plus, I figure that a lot of users may live in cities
< 1000 people and will be disappointed not to find their location
indexed.

I noticed that OpenStreetMap name lookup, called Nominatim, returned
much better results and also included a score called an importance.
One option is to build a Nominatim geodata server.  The build process
is involved and lengthy (the installation procedures say it may take
up to 10 days to build). Sadly I have not so far seen an option to
simply download a database dump.

I would like to find a geodata source that will be easily searched and
scored.  I would welcome recommendations.

-j