I would like to see some kind of confidence level alert whenever displaying driving directions. I try to run Waze with directions whenever I can so it can learn more efficient routes. Only occasionally do I rely on Waze to get me somewhere I have never been because honestly it scares me. I'm often shocked by some of the routes it recommends that I take to destinations that I am familiar with. This isn't a huge deal and is often the case because an area has errors in the map that will be corrected with time, but it would be a real help to know ahead of time what directions I can trust and which I should double check.

The mechanism I envision is fairly simplistic. If directions in a given area of the map haven't been updated or driven on in a while then those directions would be labeled as having 'moderate' accuracy. In this way, 'moderate' would be sort of like a default. Moderate accuracy shouldn't scare people off from using the service but it would give people a heads up that they should perhaps double check the route before heading off. If the roads of an area have been driven on or updated recently then driving directions in those areas could be labeled as 'high' or 'excellent' accuracy.

Also, the accuracy doesn't have to imply Waze doesn't know where it is going. The accuracy could be described as confidence that the given route is the optimal route which is probably more accurate anyway. If a given area has doesn't have a lot of recent information, how does Waze know that its calculated route is the best. This isn't a weakness, it is a strength. Waze doesn't want to find best 'technical' route based on map, it wants to find the best 'practical' route based on real life driving situations.

Maybe, in the end, Waze will have so many users and so much information that an alert like this would be superfluous. Right now, however, it would be an excellent tool to allow people to better trust the service. If I live in an area without many other users I pretty much have to assume that Waze's directions are going to have errors. This makes it much less useful to me and I may feel like I have to run a different GPS app just to be sure I get where I need to go. If just one other user happens to have driven a similar route before then I can have a lot more confidence that Waze will be useful. This is where such an alert would be handy.