Searching for alternate names in Geonames

[Drabble]

When we retrieve elements from Geonames, the only searchable fields are name, country and country code. Maybe we should also be able to search for alternate names as well (with a lower weight), so that we get more matches.

An example is the Switzerland country entry doesn't match for helvetia, suisse, schweiz, confederatio helvetica...

Some of these alternate names shouldn't be indexed because they are specific to a language. For example japanese, swedish, etc. But some of these alternate names are not specific to a language, as you can see in the code/lang columns.

[bchapuis]

Totally agree, we should also index the alternate name. I guess that the lang may be considered as a query parameter similar to the country code. What do you think?

[Drabble]

Agreed with the languages. However in the alternate names, there seem to be additional code/lang for "link to website", "EU NUTS", ... which should be ignored or treated differently.