Method
How Vid finds and ranks places.
No paid placements, no invented review stars, no black box. Here is the whole pipeline: the tags we ask OpenStreetMap for, the signals that move a place up, and the licence check behind every photo.
Last updated .
Short version. A place earns points for being covered by Wikipedia in many languages, for being read, for being heritage-listed, for having a Wikidata item and a free photo, and for being close. Type gives a modest prior. A railway station earns nothing — it is not a destination.
One explicit search, one radius
Nothing is sent to OpenStreetMap until you press Find places. Pick a centre — your location, a city, or any point on the map — and a radius from 500 metres to 50 kilometres. Vid builds one bounding box and asks the Overpass API for the tags that can describe a sight. A single query per search keeps load on the free mirrors predictable.
Results are deduplicated across OSM nodes, ways and relations, so a castle mapped as a building, a relation and a label appears once.
What gets searched
Vid uses a curated catalogue of OSM tags rather than “every named object”, which would return benches, driveways and bus stops. The main groups are:
- History: castles, forts, ruins, archaeological sites, battlefields, manors, palaces, monasteries, abbeys, priories, mines, mills, historic ships, towers and city walls.
- Sacred: churches, cathedrals, chapels, mosques, synagogues, temples and monasteries.
- Landmarks: attractions, public art, bridges, fountains, libraries, theatres, opera houses, town halls, markets, stadiums, water towers, gasometers and piers.
- Views: viewpoints, peaks, cliffs, towers, lighthouses, observatories and water towers.
- Nature: parks, gardens, nature reserves, waterfalls, caves, beaches, springs, volcanoes, glaciers, valleys, named lakes, woodland and national parks.
- Family and food: zoos, aquariums, theme parks, water parks, mini golf, restaurants, cafés, bars, pubs, bakeries and ice-cream shops.
Deliberately excluded: railway stations
and halts. A station is a waypoint, not a destination, and major termini
used to crowd out real sights in dense cities such as Vienna. Hotels,
parking, playgrounds, sports pitches and generic historic=yes
objects without a notability tag are excluded too.
OSM tagging is incomplete. To catch famous places that mappers tagged thinly, Vid also queries Wikidata for notable items of the same types and merges them in when the OSM result set is sparse.
How the score is built
Every result is scored after enrichment, once, and capped at 200. The exact weights:
| Signal | Points |
|---|---|
| Fame — Wikipedia language editions | 6 / 12 / 20 / 30 / 42 / 56 / 70 for 1 / 3 / 6 / 11 / 21 / 41 / 81+ editions |
| Popularity — average monthly Wikipedia reads | 4 / 10 / 18 / 28 / 36 / 44 for 500 / 2k / 5k / 10k / 25k / 75k+ |
| Type prior (castle, museum, church, park, café…) | 46–96 base × 0.35 = 16–34 |
| Heritage designation (OSM or Wikidata) | +12; World Heritage +8, or a high heritage grade +5 |
| Wikipedia article / Wikidata item | +8 / +3 |
| Photo with a commercial licence | +6 |
| Description | +4 |
| Website / opening hours | +2 each |
| Step-free access / outdoor seating / cuisine | +1 each |
| Proximity to the chosen centre | 0–8, scaled to the radius |
| Chain brand | −10 |
A Wikidata item that describes a city, district, street or person is
detected from its P31 type and never exports its fame to a
mis-tagged memorial or building. You can always switch the list to plain
nearest distance.
Photos, licences and credit
A photo is shown only when Wikimedia's metadata says the file is free for
commercial reuse: CC0, public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA, or Commons'
plain Attribution licence. Non-free, NC/ND, GFDL-only and files with usage
restrictions are dropped. The same check runs for Wikipedia lead images
and for the Wikidata P18 fallback.
Images are served as compressed Wikimedia thumbnails (640–800 px), never the full original. Every photo carries its author, licence and a link to the Commons file page in the popup and the detail view.
Where the data comes from
- OpenStreetMap via Overpass — places, tags, coordinates and heritage (ODbL).
- Wikipedia — descriptions, article links and lead images (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Wikidata — notability, type, heritage, sitelinks and the P18 image (CC0).
- Wikimedia Commons — per-file photo licences and author credit.
- OpenFreeMap — vector map tiles and styles.
The full attribution and commercial-use audit is in THIRD_PARTY.md.
See the method on a real map.
Create a free account, pick a place, and compare the ranked list with the nearest list. The same scores, the same data, no ads in between.