Search and Explore

Search and Explore

Searching for a place

Type an address, a place name or a category. Results are ordered with your position in mind.

Part	Source	Behaviour
Addresses and place names	Nominatim	Waits 1.1 s between calls, no autocomplete — it is a free public service
Categories and brands near you	Overpass over OpenStreetMap	One query, plus at most one widening if it finds little
Transit stops	Transitous	A normal place search also asks it for matching stops — see Privacy

The search screen also offers one-tap categories near your position — fuel, restaurant, supermarket, ATM, pharmacy, hospital, police, post office, parking, hotel and charging — plus your history and saved places.

Plain-language queries

Roadstr understands searches such as "vegan restaurants near me", "pharmacy open now", "petrol stations along the route" or "restaurants in a town". A deterministic parser with one word list per language reads them — no model and no server of ours.

• English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch have a full word list. The other twenty languages cover about nineteen core categories, and English words work everywhere.
• When nothing is recognised, the ordinary search runs.
• Some searches find few places because few are tagged for them in OpenStreetMap; the list says so.
• Along the route. Along the route searches the stretch still ahead, as one request. Places are ranked by the detour they cost and show how far ahead they are.

Optional web results

Off by default, with no instance built in. You can point Roadstr at a SearXNG instance you choose (Settings → Search → Web results in search). It receives your search words, the name of your town for "near me" searches, your language and the safe-search level — never your coordinates — and it is asked only when you agree. Roadstr never asks for Google engines, though an instance you do not control may use them behind the scenes. Results that match a place on the map are linked to it. To run your own instance, see Self-hosting.

By default a web result opens in your own browser. There is an optional build variant with an in-app browser (GeckoView, a private session that keeps nothing and denies every permission); it is not part of the normal APK — see Build from source.

Explore

Explore browses the places around an area you choose, by category — food and drink, attractions and culture, shopping, nature and outdoors, services, transport, health, sport and leisure, lodging, or all of them. Open it with Explore this area on the search screen.

• Results from the different providers are de-duplicated and ranked with distance in mind.
• If one provider fails, the next is tried. Being offline, or every provider failing, is reported plainly instead of showing an empty list.

Place details

A place card shows the OpenStreetMap details Roadstr can read — amenities and access, parking, EV connectors, whether Lightning/Bitcoin is accepted — and a restricted in-app Wikipedia reader. Unknown stays unknown: a tag the map does not have is not guessed.

Voice search

The microphone button recognises what you say on the phone — see Voice search.