The story
Sc. 01 · the brief
A birth certificate says Tolbukhin. The map says Dobrich.
GeoNames answers where a place is today. geonam.ing answers which place it was on the day: its name then and the act that named it. People are born in towns that have since been renamed, and a search that only knows today's map can't find them.
Sc. 02 · what we built
18,970,025 places, 5.5 million more than the standard.
The base is every feature in GeoNames, 13,473,160 of them, and the database has grown well past it. A search reads one small shard, so finding Leningrad never means loading the world. Everything is written in Linked Places Format, the World Historical Gazetteer's own.
Sc. 03 · how we built it
One country at a time, held to its own register.
Bulgaria came first, read from the national statistics institute's register of settlements: 1,832 places with a name history and 2,083 former names, each with its date and its act. The busiest year was 1934, with 969 renames. The other countries follow by the same method as timezon.ing.
Sc. 04 · the detail
From 26 old names found to 1,168.
1,272 of Bulgaria's former names are ones a person could still type, because no place uses them today. OCO's birthplace search used to find 26 of them. With the register behind it, it finds 1,168, and 1,050 of those come up first.
Sc. 05 · where it stands
Working inside OCO; its own site comes next.
Bulgaria's former names already serve OCO's birthplace search. The domain is registered and the product's own site isn't up yet.