It seems that searching a POI by name does only retrieve elements that have a matching "name=xxx" OSM attribute.
It would be more than interesting to also match the other name attributes ("int_name=xxx", "alt_name=xxx" and "alt/name:<country code>=xxx"): when in a foreign country, that would help a lot! (especially when the original name is written in a character set not installed on the user's cellphone)