A couple URs (UR1,UR2 andUR3) popped up recently stating that when asking Waze to navigate to the Mililani Walmart Waze was directing the user to the other end of Lanikuhana Ave. a couple of miles away. Initially I Observed a lack of a nearby inbound parking lot road to Walmart from Lanikuhana and added one. It only had an outbound one way to the main outbound two way. When I used the livemap to check if it remedied the problem it still gives directions to the wrong location. Some road changes were made again so will have to wait for those to go live for further troubleshooting. With the Places info for Walmart being correct it shouldn’t be throwing it that far off. I have already had some conversation through the #3 UR about it and was recommended to bring it up in the forum for higher intervention. Thoughts?
This is just a guess, but … usually when a bad direction looks like this, YP.com is involved. It could be one of the others, too (Foursquare, Yelp, Google), but YP is the worst.
Here’s my theory: The Place Point marker for Walmart is filled out correctly, but the Places layer hasn’t been working properly in the past weeks (months!). Intermittently, I think it flames out altogether.
When there is no good Waze data for a destination, Waze will often rely on one of its third-party search engines, and for reasons I can’t fathom, yellowpages.com is the go-to.
If you look at the purple Waze navigation track, it appears Waze is directing the reporter to drive to the south. It may be they chose the wrong one from the list, but there could be errors in the search engines, too. Example: One of the listings on yp.com for Walmart Mililani is 95-1249 Meheula Pkwy, instead of the Lanikuhana address. And the pin is in the entirely wrong place. I’m not sure this is at fault for this direction, but I’m submitting a correction there.
If you want to do me a favor and communicate with this reporter, thank them and tell them that we suspect that Waze pulled up bad coordinates from one of the search engines it uses and that we’re submitting corrections.
The bottom line is that when bad directions are given, most of the time is because the Waze Place file is lacking in the street address, which compels Waze to use one of the third-party sources.
Awesome! Glad you have some idea of what is causing this. It was driving me nuts trying to figure it out. I’ll keep this in mind for future UR’s like this as well. Definitely going to give some more positive feedback to this reporter for finding this one. Thanks for the help! Shall I close out the UR’s?
Just had another one pop up it looks like. UR Link. When I search Office Depot near that location in live map, the search suggests this “Office Depot, Farrington Highway, Waipahu, HI, United States” and it is located where the UR is although Waze doesn’t have Office Depot listed as a place.