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Waze app address lookup details (from Ohad)

Post by AlanOfTheBerg
After I found some house numbers in Waze which had a range entered (single house number with "344-356" as the number, which doesn't work, BTW), I asked Ohad for some more detail on house address lookup works in the US in the app. Here is his answer:
Ohad via email wrote:When you start entering a search string, the autocomplete results are being populated by Google - if you tap one of the results and there's a Waze house number defined and properly matched for that result - that will be the navigation target.

If after entering a search string you ignore the autocompleted results and tap the 'search' button, the results shown will be a mixture of both Waze's and Google's search engine results. Again - if you tap one of the results that has a Waze house number defined for it (even a Google one), that house will be the navigation target.

One caveat is that if the search algorithm failed to match the correct street name in the Waze map, it cannot know there's a Waze number for it and this will not work.
Example - I searched for 'Sunset Court', and the Waze street name for that street is 'Sunset Ct' and for some reason the algorithm failed to match that - the house numbers you've entered in Sunset Ct will not be provided as a navigation target for me.
If this looks pretty good and matches our experience, I think we should be updating the House Numbers page. However, since not every country uses Google or another source, I wasn't sure how much we change on that page, and how, versus having some kind of country-specific page or maybe a new section of the HNs wiki page with country-specific lookup info.

One thing I can't necessarily verify 100% is "how to determine if there is a perfect match and the result is from a Waze house number"? When you search house numbers in the beta editor, the results are from Waze nearly 100% of the time, and the search pin lands at the stop point (on the road). Perhaps the stop point in the app would show the same? May need to test this out.

What's everyone's thoughts about this?
AlanOfTheBerg
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
scerruti wrote:
AlanOfTheBerg wrote: When you search house numbers in the beta editor, the results are from Waze nearly 100% of the time, and the search pin lands at the stop point (on the road). Perhaps the stop point in the app would show the same?
Am I missing something, doesn't this break door-to-door routing to stores in large parking lots? Perhaps that is irrelevant because you rarely search for stores directly by address, but for apartment complexes with numbered buildings you do.

Also, does this get applied for contact searches?
You are totally correct about the stop-point problem. That the stop point becomes the navigation destination is the main reason we pleaded with Waze not to release internal house number search about a year ago. We did the testing and found that for any address for which the location was really close by (aka houses and businesses in urban/tight settings), that navigation stopped too soon and was significantly worse than relying on external data.

Contact searches where you enter a name, and Waze brings up the contact and then you tap on it and Waze looks up the address? Yes, it should apply there. I don't think Waze looks inside your contact records for an address you enter. Could be wrong on that.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
CBenson wrote:Are you saying that waze is using its own internal house numbers for these results? If so that is not consistent with my experience.
That is what Ohad says will happen, but only if the algorithm does a 100% match with the search string to the Waze house number database. I am also not sure this is how it works in the wild, and exactly what my paragraph starting "One thing I can't necessarily verify..." is about. If this is how it works and it does work, how can we tell?
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
My example which shows I am unable to get a match to the Waze house number is this one:

530 E Edgewood Dr, Newberg, OR

I've entered "530 E Edgewood Dr, Newberg, OR" and "530 E Edgewood Dr Newberg OR" and received the same single result in the app. This result is missing the "E" for East, and the pin location does not match the stop point nor the house number location found in WME.

From this single check, I'd say either the address-matching algorithm is extremely poor, or needs some kind of trickery in order to work. I have also done the search using 3 different accounts in the app, just to ensure that some "beta search server" isn't giving me non-standard results.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
sketch wrote:...but choosing the Instant result does give the Waze pin location in the middle of the dead-end block.
Ohad wrote that the auto-fill (I assume what you mean by 'instant result') is only populated by google. But even if you tap on that, Waze still may be the source behind the "navigation target."
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
CBenson wrote:I'm also now getting the waze stop point from the search result for 503 E Edgewood Dr, Newberg, OR, but the Google pin if I select the autocomplete result. Again I don't know what I've done differently than before.
I don't. These are not the same. The Waze app pin matches the Google location.
530_e_edgewood_wme.JPG
WME House Number
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530_e_edgewood_app.png
App Result
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530_e_edgewood_google.jpg
Google Result
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
CBenson wrote:I get the intersection when I select the search result:
Edgewood.png
Sorry about the typo, I am searching for 530 E Edgewood, Newberg, OR.
Are you using an account connected to the beta search server? That's exactly where'd I'd expect the Waze stop point to be, yes. Why is the "street/road without a name" popup there?
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
Ready for some more details? :D
Ohad on interpolation wrote:In the US, if no exact user-defined house number match is found we fallback to external sources. No interpolation is being done.

The production editor behaves the same.

The beta editor is unique in that it's not using external sources, so that's the only place where that interpolation does occur if the specified house number doesn't exist
Ohad on Waze-Google matching wrote:...the bottleneck is precisely matching the Google street name in the result with the relevant Waze street. We are looking into ways to make this more flexible and work in more cases
Ohad on Waze HN source wrote:...we only take into account house numbers that a Waze community member explicitly entered or updated, and not house numbers that we obtained from possibly non-accurate external sources which have not been modified by an editor in WME. We trust you guys way more than we trust our external search providers which, in turn, we trust more than imported 3rd party data to our database.
Ohad on distance from target affect on results wrote:The search query does take your current location into account, however I can't see why it would matter in the Newberg example.
There's some good stuff in here which should be incorporated into the HNs page. Again, though, I think we need to decide how to treat US+Canada info different from other countries. Just the country split adds considerable complexity in how to efficiently communicate this information.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
Only one at a time.
hn_last_updated_by.jpg
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Would be cool if a small marker could be added, or the background color of the HN changed slightly if it has been updated in the Waze interface.

I'm fairly certain that something like Toolbox/Validator could scan and find such things. Or a script could enable modifying the UI a bit before Waze gets around to it.
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Last edited by AlanOfTheBerg on Thu Jan 30, 2014 7:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
tonestertm wrote:Does this mean that we should be giving all "un-updated" House Numbers a nudge, after verifying they're correct, in order to increase confidence?
Maybe? :?
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