Overview:
Full Search v2 streamlines the search flow to first query the Google Maps database, then Waze’s database if there is no match. When results are linked, Waze results will be displayed instead of Google results. Linking Waze venues to Google Maps POIs is the best way to ensure that Waze results are prioritized to be shown to users.
Benefits of venue matching:
- Enables us to show more Waze results in Search
- Allows us to better extract missing Waze data from available Google sources
- Reduce duplicates in search, which lead to confusion and distrust
- Improves ranking, from not having to split the prominence of two places
Venue Matching Mechanics:
We have recently launched a new algorithm to better detect Waze and Google Place matches automatically, through machine learning.
Before, Waze identified matches with Google places through two sources: 1– our editors & 2 – an old, rule-based system in our servers. The rule based algorithm looked at how similar two places were in name, phone number, and distance. However, because Place names are different in Waze and many places do not have a phone number, we did a poor job catching these matches.
Now, with our new machine learning algorithm, we can look at many new factors to determine if a place is a match, like: country, city, lat - long, website, street names, category, and more. As a reminder, user matches (made by editors) will always be prioritized over algorithm matches. This means that if an editor links two places, the automatcher will skip those places, taking the community’s manual match as the primary signal and it won’t be overridden.
