Using the locator branch, I noticed that many cities in Austria are not findable anymore. The problem is that there are words like "Gemeinde Mödling" or "Bezirk Mödling" or "county XYZ". There should be a list where one can enter words that get deleted. That is because for the boundary it is the correct name, but not for searching a street.
Also there are problems in Austria in Vienna. Vienna is a state and a city, and ideally it should be possible to enter either the district or the city into the city field, in order to find a street. Currently it is not possible to properly separate cities outside Vienna from districts inside Vienna, as they have the same admin_level. But for the ise tags, there is a correct specification telling you that districts are not cities (from the standpoint of the admin_level, it is correct however to classify them the same as small cities outside of Vienna). So in effect if one does not enter specific rules for Vienna, address search can never work as expected. Admin_level was never intended to be used for address searching, hence taking it is flawed and will not provide correct results. Ise is intended for address searching, but mkgmap does not use it.
In general after using the locator branch, I more and more think, that the whole matching is completly the wrong way of doing. Much better to support real addresses as entered in OSM, and not do so much guessing. Especially support housenumbers, as at least in Germany and Austria housenumbers including full ise tags are becoming the norm, and not the exception. Only footways, pathes, or tracks should be matched, as they usually have no real address - but then it's rare that one searches for a specific path/track/footway, only real use would therefore be
Felix, I understand that you are no longer interested in. Anyhow the mkgmap source code contains a SubstitutionFilter class which performs some string replacements. This should work to replace and to remove common words. I don't know how this filter can be configured in the style file but maybe someone else remembers. WanMil