The waze live map can be a very useful tool to waze map editors attempting to help other wazers get map problems fixed. It would be even more useful if the search feature could find nearby businesses when one types a portion of the business name or a related keyword (such as grocery, gas, brewery, etc) in the search box.
Waze Team: Please improve the search feature on Live Map to be more-or-less equivalent to what is offered in the app.
Here is an example of a case where Live Map could not find a very nearby business:
I started at https://www.waze.com/livemap?lon=-75.60282&lat=39.78402&zoom=17
I searched “brewery” and then “brewing” and came up with nothing nearby, instead turning up businesses with “brewery” and “brewing” in their name in distant cities.
Even when I select “more results”, I get businesses in Lancaster PA, in CA, in NJ … anything but the brewery that is less than a mile away.
Thanks for your help.
Is the brewery on the waze map?
No. But if I search for “Brewery” or “brewing” (and use the search button) in the app, I get “Twin Lakes Brewing Co” in Greenville in the results.
I cannot, in live map, get this result to come up unless I explicitly search for “Twin Lakes”.
Thanks for your suggestion. I can imagine that adding a point with the business name and perhaps “brewery” in the description is a possible workaround for this location. I do not prefer this workaround because, to implement it in a way that is helpful to waze map editors will require that somebody add every single business to the waze map.
Hence my request to the waze team to make the livemap search more-or-less equivalent. I recognize that it might not be at the top of their list right now, but it would certainly be a big help to the WME community on which waze depends so heavily for its success, and so I hope that this request for enhancement of live map will be on the list somewhere. As I cannot see their working list, I have no idea whether I am requesting something that is already properly prioritized. If so, I apologize for making the request.
Agreed it would be helpful. However, I’m not expecting this as waze does seem to want to take the route of requiring that somebody add every single business to the waze map. See here.
That’s an interesting point.
Even so, I think it would be useful for the live map search to be roughly equivalent to the search in the app. Such a huge difference between the two platforms is confusing.
I do agree. Though I’m wondering at this point whether waze’s view of the solution is to remove the Google search results from the waze tab in the app rather than add them to the live map. Waze claims that the routing is the same between the two (if the app is using default routing parameters), however as you note there are difference in the search results returned so the destinations can be different if you search for the same thing in the app or the live map. This does complicate troubleshooting routing issues that turn out to really be destination location issues.
In the case where the business has not been added to Waze, it would be useful if livemap would go search Google for it, as the app does.
There is no destination location issue. The destination is simply not there at all.
If V3.9 of the mobile app is going to stop checking Google for stuff that has not been entered into Waze, then I would argue that would be a step backwards.
but at least it would be consistent 
You touch on a bunch of ancillary issues. The search routines seem to be constantly being tweaked and they also vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction depending on how waze is using Google data in different places. So unfortunately how Google data is incorporated into the search results in the app varies from time to time and from country to country. This makes making the live map consistent an issue. As the search results seem to be tweaked on the backend, I’m not sure if any major changes in the search results will necessarily be timed with the release of either v3.9 or v4.0. My understanding is that at some point Google results should disappear from the waze tab in the search results. But that the Google results would still be available from the Google tab. However, I could be wrong.
In your case there is no destination location issue. But another problem is that selecting an autofill result or result from the Google tab will sometimes route me to subtly different locations than selecting the same result from the waze tab. In these cases, the live map has not routed me to the same location as the result from the selecting the location from the waze tab in the app. However, this has only caused me issues for address searches, not POI searches.
Yep. Would be awesome if the “search for location” application layer could be the same on all platforms.