Author: floscher
[Added to the original trac issue at 12.04am, Friday, 23rd October 2015]

I investigated this a bit and found, that Nominatim is stumbling over Las Vegas, because the building is not inside the [https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/170117 OSM-border of the city Las Vegas], but rather inside the border of the unincorporated town [http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/170132 Enterprise].

So all of the following strings are resolving correctly with Nominatim:

• 7135 S Decatur Blvd, Enterprise, NV 89118
• 7135 S Decatur Blvd, NV 89118
• 7135 S Decatur Blvd, Clark County
• 7135 South Decatur Boulevard
• 7135 S Decatur Blvd

I see two ways of resolving the issue:
Either Nominatim takes into account, that [http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/170132 Enterprise] has a tag saying alt_name=Las Vegas and that [http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/172739953 the building] has a tag addr:city=Las Vegas.
Or someone extends the border of Las Vegas in OSM-data, so it surrounds everything belonging to the city of Las Vegas.

The latter solution should only be carried out by an OSM-user with experience in editing administrative boundaries and proper knowledge of the correct extent of the city of Las Vegas.

Author: tom.sommer[at]onassignment.com
[Added to the original trac issue at 4.59pm, Friday, 23rd October 2015]

Ok, I see what you mean. Funny, I never knew it was actually not in the city of Vegas. Not even the strip is in the city of Vegas.

Since it seems many of the other mapping systems are able to resolve the address with the city set as "Las Vegas", what avenue should I use to approach OSM to make a change to align with the other systems? Sorry, again, I am new to this and do not know the proper protocol.

Oh yes, is Nominatim simply a front end to OSM?

Thanks for all of your help with this!

Author: lonvia
[Added to the original trac issue at 7.32pm, Friday, 23rd October 2015]

There is indeed not much Nominatim can do about this until the admin borders in the US get sorted out in OSM.

One interesting thing to note: the boundary of Enterprise is currently broken and therefore missing in nominatim: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?osmtype=R&osmid=170132 Once it gets repaired the alt_name actually will be resolved (you can already see it on the details page) and the address will be found if you type 'Las Vegas' as the city. The display name will still show Enterprise, though.

Closing here because it is a data problem.

Author: floscher
[Added to the original trac issue at 9.22pm, Friday, 23rd October 2015]

Thank you lonvia for the tip with the broken relation. I fixed the relation and now the string 7135 S Decatur Blvd, Las Vegas, NV 89118 is correctly geocoded: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=7135+S+Decatur+Blvd%2C+Las+Vegas%2C+NV+89118

@tom.sommer:
Nominatim is the most popular [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocoding geocoder] in the OpenStreetMap-world, which is e.g. also used for the search on https://openstreetmap.org . This bugtracker is for bugs in the software (in this case the geocoder). For other things like e.g. data-issues that you can't resolve on your own, the [http://forum.openstreetmap.org forums], one of the [http://lists.openstreetmap.org mailinglists] or [http://help.osm.org] are the ideal places to get in contact with experienced mappers. And for individual things missing from the map there are also [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Notes Notes].
But don't be afraid of not following a protocol. There are not many irrevocable rules in OSM, so as long as you respect the other mappers ("the community") and are willing to discuss with and learn from them, there's not much you can do wrong.