IdahoMtnSpyder
Active member
One town it can’t find is Waldo, AL, where I was too meet up with some friends by an old covered bridge. I’ll send you my address via PM.
Sygic does not list all small towns in its database, especially if the post office address is a different city. Waldo addresses are listed as Talladega and is only 283 population. Sygic finds Waldo Quick Stop but as Hwy 77, Talladega. It does not list Waldo Covered Bridge so I guess it's not sufficiently prominent to get into their database. Google does not give a street address for it either. But Mump Creek Road comes right up! As soon as I searched for 58988 al-77 it listed 58988 AL Highway 77, Talladega, Alabama, the address for the Quick Stop.
Sygic uses TomTom maps but what POI database I don't know. The question is how many of the POIs in Sygic are there because of TomTom and/or Sygic people scouring various databases, and how many are there because of suggestions from users. They are constantly updating it.
Another small town Sygic doesn't find is Beaverton, AL, pop 201. It finds Bunk House Conversions but with a Sulligent address. It does not find Beaverton Baptist Church, but that could be because Google doesn't even show a streeta address for it. It does find Value Star in Beaverton with an address of 12901 US-278, Sulligent. Google shows the address as Beaverton. Beaverton must have only PO boxes as street addresses don't show up in the USPS.com Zip Code search.
As for your home address you apparently live in two cities in one house! Google finds you with both B************* and M***************** as city names, but Sygic only finds you with M***************** city name.
I ran into a search problem with Sygic in North Idaho a few years ago. I was looking for an address on O'Gara Road. Sygic couldn't find it. I finally put in Ogara and up it came! The road sign shows O'Gara. Google finds it both ways.
The upshot is if the place you are searching for in Sygic is obscure, or small, or has variations of spelling, or is known by more than one name, you very well may have problems finding it. It would be really interesting to do a comparison of how other GPS programs, especially TomTom based, deal with these situations. I've felt for some time Sygic search algorithm needs to be more heuristic. As far as city names, for cities themselves and for addresses, Sygic is somewhat at the mercy of their data providers. TomTom maps must be by and large pretty decent since they are used by several GPS programs. One suggestion for doing a search in Sygic is don't get in a rush to enter the entire address. For your home address it came up with using just the street number and name and state. When I included the large city name it didn't find it. That's a shortcoming in the search algorithm I think. It should be able to leave out or substitute incorrect entries.
Before we get too critical comparing any GPS program with Google Maps we need to keep in mind that Google is probably hundreds of times bigger than any GPS company, and they specialize in capturing all the data they can about users. That gives them data resource capabilities that can instantly drown any GPS company.