We lost to Nominatim in Europe. Then we found out why.

We ran our 30 MB browser geocoder against the incumbents — Nominatim and Pelias — on real European addresses, scored the honest way. We'd just won the US; Europe opened with a double-digit loss. The cause was silence: on messy addresses we returned nothing at all. Here's what the silence was made of, the three fixes that took us clear of both incumbents in Europe, and the one place — Australia —…