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Making house numbers work on Cartesian-based addresses

Post by Calopez78
Hi!

All around the world, simplifying a lot, you search for a unique house by searching first the Street where it's located and then it's house number. So you would search first for "Street" and then for the incumbent "house number"

Colombia is one of the (seemingly few) countries that have cartesian-coordinate-based addresses system in all it's cities. Here you search for an intersection made by "Street1" and "Street2" and then, search for the house number that will be located a given direction from that intersection. By the way, our streets can be named, numbered, or both (e.g. "Autopista norte" or "Carrera 18A")

It's no surprise that the recently introduced by waze house numbering system is based on the international standard and will not work for countries like Colombia. For sure, when launched, the searching for house numbers capabilities in the client will also not work for us.

But what if we could here introduce in the house number field in the WME, not only the house number but also the information relating to "Street2"? Our house numbers would look like a text string consisting of Street2-Housenumber. Our full addresses would look now like "Street 1" "Street2-Housenumber", somehow resembling the international standard and thus making specific house-level searches available for us, with no need for different searching algorithms because of our addresses system. That kind of string would be searchable by any search engine, and most similar results should be listed first, so you should be pointed at least to the specific block, if the full string it's not found.

All this would require, is for us to be able to insert in the WME house number field, not only numbers but also alphanumeric characters, and that this field would have enough length to accommodate both Street2 and housenumber information. That is like 12 characters length.

I'm writing this for any developer at Waze to let me know if this is possible. Currently there are many complaints in Colombia about we not being able to search for addresses (even without house numbers) in the way we are used to.

Thanks!
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Carlos A. López-Calopez78
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Post by ohad-ron
Hey Carlos,

We are aware of Cartesian based addresses.

Alphanumeric characters will be available in the house number editor soon and it will work the way you suggest. However, this will not be a perfect solution as we also want to be able to parse what the users are searching for and be able to provide the exact location even if that specific house was not entered.

This will take some time - we have just started testing a new search engine that will be able to deal with these cases, but it still needs a lot of work until it is ready for public use.
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