It looks like the procedure for addition of alt cities to “No city” streets and RPPs may no longer be necessary. When the new improvements to autocomplete search were announced yesterday, there seems to have been an additional improvement that allowed Google autocomplete address results to redirect to nearby Waze results, even if they have no city.
Here’s an example RPP at 99 Jonquil Dr SW in Ohio and an example HN at 3200 W Airway Rd in Indiana, but of course many other examples can be found. Note that if a road has an alt city and HNs, but the RPP for an address on it has no city, the RPP will not be used, in favor of HNs, as those are a better match. I’ve tested many different rural roads and found one exception. HNs on this Holly Hill Rd don’t get redirects from Google, and I think this is because there’s another Holly Hill Rd in a different county whose HNs do get redirects.
This makes me wonder whether we should update the page at least with a message box that adding alt cities is not as necessary now as it was in the past to correct search problems, and that it may only be necessary if a specific search problem is identified, such as roads that have the same name in different “no city” areas.
One, we still need to confirm this behavior with staff, the new search functionality was only announced yesterday and it’s not even released to production users. So, we can afford to slow down on this.
Two, even if it does work this way with search, city names are still useful for hazard alerts such as “crash near Joplin” etc. As such, I oppose any such change to guidance.
In addition, I don’t believe the wiki forum is the correct place to discuss changes in guidance. It should be simply to document guidance as decided on by champs.
That’s why I said discussion, not page update. Of course we should confirm this, but I got excited about this improvement and wanted to start the discussion. Has anyone else seen this change? It could save us a lot of work.
I don’t understand what you mean about reports. Primary city names are used for reports, and I didn’t think primary city names were within the scope of this discussion.
I agree that when champs decide on guidance for something, we should not contradict it. Is that what you mean? Because historically the wiki forum has also been a place to discuss changes in guidance, as Kent spelled out five years ago in this sticky.
“[road] near [city]” in reports does not use alt names as far as I know. You’ll find that on reports on segments with no primary city but in some unknown proximity to other segments with a primary city or a primary city polygon (not sure which).
Regardless, I don’t see any reason to change policy at this point. In fact, if Autocomplete is giving Waze addresses natively now, that means our alt city work will allow us to bypass Google matching altogether in many cases. That’s a win.
I will add to this discussion- I recently noticed a Waze result in autocomplete that I could not find its source, and it’s incorrect. If this is related to what you’re talking about, there could be some unwanted effects from this behavior.
Yeah there is some weirdness where autocomplete blue pin addresses (supposedly from Waze) have some unrelated city on them. We’ve reported it in CenterCode
