The most frequent use case for Overpass API: Finding data by search criteria like tags, rough location or other criteria.
Alternatives
The Overpass API searches faithfully for OpenStreetMap data.
Sometimes, a more intelligent search is necessary, the so-called geocoding.
This is where Nominatim and others fare much better.
Per Tag
Request all objects that bear a chosen tag.
Pipeline Building
How to build pipelines of search criteria
to search for objects relative to other objects.
Combining by And and Or
Query for objects by multiple tags or other criteria.
List represented sets
Tools to make sense of tags representing multiple values.
This evolved in OpenStreetMap into representation as comma separated lists.
Further Search Criteria
Further search criteria like only for keys, query by length, version, number of changeset, or number of members.
next: Alternatives