Read the FAQ http://world.waze.com/faq/technical_faq/#14
and some Wiki too.

My description below only happen in blank map area or minimum road track.

For about 12-24 hours (last month 72 hours), your track route will appear in your Dashboard. You or any other user who become an Area Manager in your area will see your track too (check in Cartouche wether you have an Area Manager in your area or not).

After some editing, your track will back to the Live Map in 2-5 days (last update about 7 days). And will show in your phone too when your red track already dissapear.

Navigation guidance will only work after the Area Manager correct all road, junction, turn and everything error in the map. And any other Wazers GPS track will help to correct the road geography and direction too.

So if your area still with minimum road, please be patient and help to correct by map editing with Cartouche.

bryanjameson59 wrote:After 5 days of use waze still does not recognise my own street, why is this? also I have been driving lots of roads to and from the places I have been driving too, yet when I tried using the navigation guidance yesturday to test it out, it could not find the way back to my house

When you say that Waze "doesn't recognize" your street... do you mean that you don't see your street on the map?

There are two ways to fix this. The easiest way is to record your road using Waze. Please read about road recording, as well as what to do once the road is recorded.

The second way is to add the road using Cartouche, the map editor: here if you are in the US/Canada, or here if you are anywhere else in the world. If you choose to go this route, please read the best map editing practice (I apologize that the first sentence is in Spanish. Some user keeps insisting on editing the English pages into Spanish... I keep cleaning up after them, but I changed my password this morning and that seems to have made me unable to log in to the Wiki. I'll revert it back as soon as I can access it again, if someone doesn't get to it before me). Also take a look at the map editing section. There should be plenty of information there to get you started adding roads.

As for why it couldn't find a way back to your house: Waze's maps are user-generated. You're probably in an area that started out with a base map, but by default Waze things that all roads on a base map are "no entrance" roads... better to be conservative than to route you down a one-way road, right?

If you drive around with Waze running, it will learn eventually where it can and can't go. If you're in an area without many users it will take longer because you're starting from the very beginning. If you want to speed things up (or correct some errors that just won't ever be corrected automatically), read the information above about map editing. The neat thing about Waze is that the maps are user-generated and maintained... but that also means that it needs users to teach it which roads are two-way or one-way, which turns are allowed and not allowed, etc. So it's frustrating when you just start out, since Waze doesn't really know anything. Once you have a good map, Waze gets really neat because it's so much more accurate and interactive than any other nav system.