Reporter: stanton
[Submitted to the original trac issue database at 11.02pm, Wednesday, 26th January 2011]

Imagine the following scenario: You want to describe someone (via e-mail) how to find a certain POI - say, a restaurant.

You go to the OSM site, enter the name of the place in Search and get a list of results. You click the one you were looking for and get an arrow on the map, pointing to the location.

Now... how do you get this to that other person?

It would be nice if search came up with an easy way to get a link like
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=42&mlon=42&zoom=16

mlat, mlon being the position of your chosen POI, zoom the currently selected zoom.

Such a link could easily be sent by e-mail, and it would take the visitor directly to the surroundings of the POI, with a marker showing the POI's position, at the zoom level set by the sender.

As long as Nominatim has access to the coordinates (which I suppose it does), the link shouldn't be too hard to construct. The only design issue is where to place it on the screen. How about

(share link)

next to each search result?