Understanding the Waze navigation process can help map editors to better understand the effect of changes made to the Waze map.
Selecting A Destination
Search
When a user enters search and selects a destination, several factors affect how the destination location is determined.
Completed queries
When a user enters a search query, Waze typically compares the the search queries to Address and Place data from Waze and Google.
If the search query is parsed as an address (e.g. starts with a numeral or ends with a street identifier like Rd, St, Blvd, etc) then the search defaults to the "Search Results" tab. Otherwise, the search query is considered for a Place and the search defaults to the "Places" tab.
In either case, the search algorithm determines a score based on comparing the search query to destination data including the name/address, the distance from the current location and other parameters. The results are then presented in the order of the score. Results can come from both Waze data and Google data.
Searching by name
When a destination is entered by name, Waze will search for a matching Waze Place name within the immediate area (or matching Place name with the city information that was entered. If it finds a matching Waze Place, it will base the routing on that Place and the closest segment, whether a named segment or in a parking lot.
If Waze can't find it internally, it asks Google's Point-of Interesr (POI) map database. If Google returns a result, it will contain the Google POI name and the latitude/longitude coordinates.
The final step of this process: Waze takes the Place name Google returned, and tries to find a matching Waze Place close to the target coordinates. If it finds an exact match, it will use the Waze Place as described above.
If it can't find a match, it will use the Google coordinates for routing. A route with hat target may terminate closer to the main road than to the PLR mapped in WME for the Place.
Searching by address
When a Wazer enters a street address in search. Wake will return the best available result, in the following order of priority:
• A Residential Place Point (RPP)
• A House Number entered by a user (not from the imported database)
• A Google Maps location
• An imported House Number.
The selection may revert to the Google location in the event that the name in the City field on the Waze map does not match the Google city name. More testing is needed to understand the variables involved in an address search.
Autocomplete search results
Full search results show in a separate results screen upon completion, when the Search key is tapped. Tabs for various sources appear across the bottom - Waze, Google, Yelp, etc.
But Waze also returns "autocomplete" results as the search is being typed, shown as a dropdown from the search field. The results for autocomplete and full search work quite a bit differently.
[Discussion here]
Search results tab
Under the Places tab are supposed to be only Waze Places. However, the current function has been shown to include other results as well, such as advertisements.
[Discussion of what is known about factors in search results variability,effects of punctuation/abbreviation mismatches, etc.]