Hi, I tried posting this in the NSW forum, but got no responses. Opening it up to see if anyone else in Australia has seen this before taking it to a global forum:
Got a problems brought up by a UR.
This segment appears valid in the editor, & Validator is bringing up no problems. However, searching for it in the app or Waze live map fails to find this road.
The same issue occurs with surrounding streets, eg. Blackburn St, etc, even though you can clearly see them in the live map.
What’s going on here? Is the only way to fix this problem to search for each individual road & delete & remake?
Clicking on “More Results” gets me to the correct street.
I do not see any house numbers on this street however - so it would be entirely reliant on wherever external data feels that it is… which is… well… terrible
Once you add in some house numbers the Waze engine should do better.
Edit - I double checked the external resource - None of those streets are labeled there. If people are using the dropdown menu results they may not get any results, they will need to press the search button in order to find the results. Again the lack of house numbers on any of these streets also do not help with the navigation.
Thank you for the suggestions. I’ve been wondering how house numbers work when they aren’t filled in. Could you please suggest how I can do house numbers if we are not allowed to use any resource outside of the WME? Streetview is not available on that road & we aren’t allowed to use Google Maps, etc.
That Refresh Map of My Area was removed from the iOS version recently.
Even government maps are sometimes not government maps. That particular one you linked to seems to be a commercial map & has a disclaimer that says in part “Access to Blacktown City Council’s WebSpatial is for personal use only. You may create hardcopy products and non-editable digital images (eg: pdf files) based on the data provided. Information obtained from this site must not be commercialised, reproduced, published or distributed without written permission from Blacktown City Council. […] The Sydway Street Directory is the copyright of Melway Publishing Pty Ltd and is licensed to Blacktown City Council. No part of this digital street directory maybe reproduced or dealt with in any way which is inconsistent with the rights of Melway Publishing Pty Ltd under Copyright Law.”
I also reference this thread and this Waze wiki page that in part says “Usage of any external copyrighted source of information, in order to add information to the Waze database or maps, is not allowed. External copyright information includes any online or printed map information that is not provided by Waze through the Waze Map Editor interface.” This seems to suggest that even Google Maps provided through the maps.google.com interface is out of bounds.
Which leads us back to the original problem. If the lack of house numbers is the problem, what are we to do? How do we fill them in? Why are they causing a problem anyway? How can we explain nearby Rafter Pde which also does not have house numbers, but does show up correctly in the search field?
Good catch! Sorry, I missed that last night (for me) - Will note and be more careful in the future with those references =).
I do wonder if we can obtain written permission from the Blacktown City Council though =P.
Beyond that, and again this is just me troubleshooting, I would wonder what would happen if we arbitrarily set up a “1” on one end of the street and a “99” on the other end of the street and see how Waze would navigate? Again, I would double check with your higher ups on this one before implementing it and I can try to test this on my own streets. If Waze isn’t offering any navigation, I’m not so sure what harm would be done doing so.
Rafter Pde does have an result that in can be found in an external resource - that is what is probably being called I assume, which fits the overall archetype for Waze Searches:
Waze Residential Places
Confirmed Waze House Numbers
Google Address Pins
Unconfirmed Waze House Numbers (if no Google pin is found)
Yeah interesting one. The street is NOT in google maps which is why the search initially fails I am guessing. This is because as I understand it google is the default search engine. As you have found if you click on “more results” you will find it.
I dont think it will help but you could ask the original reporter what street address they went to and then you could add that number onto the map.
Google mapmaker is not available in Australia so I don’t know how you can go about getting those streets added to the google database.
I think the easiest fix here is just to tell the reporter that if that ever happens try “more results”.
Gav…
P.S. https://support.google.com/waze/answer/6262563?hl=en
If you can’t find an address or place, try a different search engine by sliding between search provider options on the bottom of the search results screen.
Adding in a house number will allow Waze to then start making “calculations” based off of where a house number is based off of the information that is available in Waze. I.E. if Waze KNOWS that House number 7 is here, and house number 137 is there, then it will try to estimate where house number 95 is - If it doesn’t have any information to go on, well, it has no information to go on which is why “Street with a name but no house numbers” is something that is highlightable using the toolbox I imagine.
I dont know enough about how Waze does this however if you just ask Waze to take you to a street and dont specify a house number then it will take you to roughly the middle of the street. You can’t do this at the moment because it isn’t coming up in the main search but if the reporter knows to select “More Results” then they will be sweet.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I’ve used this street as a test bed for how Waze searches. I’ve added house numbers for 1, 19, 21 & 99 on one side, and 2 & 100 on the other side. The numbers are wrong; I’ve just entered them for testing purposes.
Searching using Waze Live Map still fails to find “Howarth St Ropes Crossing” unless “More Results” is selected, in which case the pin appears somewhat near the middle of the road length.
Searching for “1 Howarth St Ropes Crossing” (or any other house number as entered) fails to find it unless “More Results” is selected, in which case the pin appears at the correct house location.
Searching for “30 Howarth St Ropes Crossing” (or any other house number not specifically entered) fails to find it unless “More Results” is selected, in which case only “Howarth St” is found without a specific house number.
I think this reveals two interesting points:
(1) There’s something fundamentally wrong with this street. Why isn’t Waze finding it using the built-in search engine? I suspect that the street needs to be deleted & recreated, but have no idea why.
(2) Searching for house numbers doesn’t interpolate for house numbers which aren’t specifically entered. It’s not good enough just to enter the “corner” houses & let Waze interpolate the remainder. Editors must enter every single house. This is very time consuming, and more or less ensures that house numbers will never be completed in Waze because the workload is exponentially increased.
I propose that I delete the street & recreate it as the next step in testing, but will leave it as it for the time being for others to poke around at the current situation & offer hopefully more insights as to what’s going on.
May I ask when you added in the house numbers? I’m currently running a test on House Numbers myself in a neighborhood so I’d be happy to try to confirm and work on experimenting with this.
I added them I think on 30 July, based on suggestions made in this thread. The tiles have been updated since then. Interestingly, the segment didn’t register a change in “last updated” date when I added the house numbers.
Correct that is in part of my test to test the theory that HN’s do not require a tile update / are updated separately from tile updates.
I’d be curious if you wait a few more days (up to 5 days total) to see if it comes through, before nudging a segment to force a tile update to see if that pulls in the house numbers.
But yes, nudging HN’s will show who it was last edited by within the HN interface when you touch them, it will not say when they were last edited I don’t believe.
I still think the issue is that the street isn’t in the Google map which is why the search is failing but yeah go-ahead and redraw the street and see if that fixes it. I will be interested to hear!
Also street numbers exist in the Google map database so that is how Waze normally gets the street address. So I don’t normally bother entering street numbers unless a new street does not have numbers in Google. If the number is in Google but all piled up together (which happens with new estates) I put in a bunch of change requests to Google (again I don’t worry about the Waze map)
