Garmin has always had problems it seems

No one system is perfect. A friends house has an address that starts with a Letter, like W1234 County Road A. Garmin finds it no problem, Google maps doesn't have a clue. Google maps lists that address as 1234 County Road A (which really doesn't exist)

NavteQ/HERE, Google and a few others provide most of the data we use in our personal navigation devices these days. None are 100% accurate.

It isn't Garmins fault. They currently use HERE but if there were a better one available, they would probably elect to use it.

It's best to continue what you are doing and use more than one source.

Garmin uses a simple search format. While your example needs a town and state for me to verify that Garmin can find the location, you would search for the street "82" which would find all forms of State Highway 82, Hwy-82, IL-82, US82, Co-82, etc.

This isn't the fault of Garmin, HERE, or Google. There are multiple names for the same street. Middle Country Road is the same as Route 25, SR 25, NY 25, and the name changes in different towns. Close to my home, there are 1st Street and First Street less than a half mile apart. This will only be corrected after lives are lost in an emergency.

No one database can anticipate all these names. It is up to the user of the GPS to do data entry in a format the device understands. If not, it is "operator error."

dobs108

Ya.. not perfect, but I think they are the best available at this point in time.

That's a good one....if Garmin can't find an address, the user needs to figure out another format so that Garmin can understand. If said user can't do that, then it's operator error. You're being facetious, right?

Seriously though, many addresses in NJ are formatted that way, and it's happened before.

If a smartphone has no issue with the same address, forgetting about politics, then people likely just use the smartphone.

p.s. I often think to myself, am I a fanboy of any one company, we see this a lot on the web. I don't think that I am, if a product fails, it fails, I don't defend it just because I am loyal to the brand

This is good to know. I spend a lot of time fishing in a rural area, and never know how to enter lettered routes, i.e. Hwy H, State Road H, County Road H, etc. Now I'll just search for H. Same for numbered route names, like your example.

I am serious - if you enter the address in a way the GPS understands, you are on your way. If not, you are going nowhere. Like all computer equipment, it is only searching for a text string. Artificial intelligence has not yet advanced to the point where all the different names of a street are related together.

Why didn't you say you were driving in New Jersey? It's like entering the twilight zone. It is not surprising that streets there have multiple names. If you turn off the interstate or parkway by mistake, you may be dealing with an hour's odyssey before rejoining the route!

dobs108

The Phone sends the address to Google which has much larger computers than the one in you GPS so it can check different formats quickly. Your GPS doesn't have the processing power or time to figure out all the possibilities.

My response is based mostly on having been in Information Technology for a number of years and thinking about I as a programmer would go about taking an address and looking it up in a database that I had been given to use in converting text strings into geographic coordinates. I was thinking about whether the database used all of the possibilities like State (St St.), Highway (Hwy Hwy.), etc

It would be interesting to know the exact text strings you tried entering for that place that has been there for 50 years. That might help us understand exactly what entry combination would have let your device find the destination.

Bear in mind that your smartphone itself was only the conduit which let you get to Google where tremendous artificial intelligence could be brought to bear to find your destination. And, did you enter exactly the same "strings" when searching Google as you entered into your Garmin device?

...to give my GPS fits. I think it's the way they handle their road names with all of the North County Road 151, etc. Sometimes you just have to get creative when you are trying to find an address.

For better or for worse, regardless of brand, as noted numerous times here. Good that you had a Plan B in your android.

A house in Texas was wrongly demolished by a company relying on the Google Maps location:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/25/technology/google-maps-house...

Like I said, "operator error."

dobs108

My comment to the OP would have gone like this too. I find myself needing to navigate NJ quite often where a lot of the roads don't have a name, just a number.

My older 2460 Garmin would come up with a location quicker because you enter in the town/zip, then the street, whereas my newer 2689 would list all similar streets leaving me to decide which one I'm looking for.

As a side note .... My biggest complaint about NJ is they can't figure out if you can make an actual left turn or need to use a jug handle to accomplish the turn. At least they've done away with most of the traffic circles.

Those issues are very frustrating, but you could look upon it as a learning opportunity. Let's face it, many of us expect immediate satisfaction. We want the device to find the location immediately and navigate us to the location with the absolute most efficient route possible.

Like others already mentioned, it is dependent upon the data being used. When I have had issues like this, when I get to my destination, I will try to determine how my Garmin lists it when I am there. Often times that is helpful.

Again, like others have noted, DON'T depend on just ONE device. Although I was never in the armed forces, they have an old saying that "two is one and one is none." There is a lot of wisdom in that saying.

My family and I drove from MN to NC and back last year. We used both a Garmin Nuvi 3597 and Google maps. Both had their pros and cons.

Some things that Garmin has done to improve searches are the drill down menu style. For example, when you select the state, and then the city or ZIP code, it narrows the possibilities.

Streets and roads with multiple names often seem to be a challenge. Just exactly like the example shown, I have seen state roads go by various names.

I'm surprised any computer works reliably.

And the amount of data that has to be crunched, sorted and searched ... well, it's mind boggling.

Today I was in a gas station and noticed a wall display of folded paper maps and a few atlases. I admit that I still own a few paper maps ... but still I was shocked they still sell maps ... knowing how well car, smart phones and stand alone GPS units work.

Sure, nothing is perfect. But we've come a long way from using paper maps ... holding them in one hand, trying to read the tiny coded street names in the index, and then try to find row W line 8 on the folded map while blasting down the road at 70 mph.

Talk about distracted driving! And don't get me started on my wife's paper-map-reading skills.

The Garmin may be wrong on occasion, but it's wrong faster than I am, and that saves me time!

The longest trip I've taken with a Garmin and no paper maps ran seven weeks. During that seven weeks we hit over two hundred and fifteen points that were laid out in advance in a POI file. The trip covered twelve thousand miles. There were a couple times the GPS map was incorrect. The time of the combined delay was only about 20 minutes for the entire 12000 mile run.

Thank you Garmin.

on my Garmin and in dash units.

my 350 has always gotten me to where I was going.

Fred

I have had this issue with Garmin but not Waze. Garmin will miss the address if a dash is or is not added. Waze does not do this but will try to figure out the correct address. Garmin just works on what you give it.

I have found Garmin can be frustrating with some addresses especially in rural communities. Google Maps is more accurate and easier to use overall with addresses IMO. But neither one is 100% accurate all the time and every time. It's just not possible..at least not yet.

I really like my Nuvi 2689 however it is much less intuitive and seems to be much pickier with address input. I left TomTom for lack of memory for additional poi' s and maps not fitting after a couple years of updates. The search logarithm does not allow you to start with a state in the Garmin for location, it immediately defaults to street names and addresses in yours and the two adjacent states. I have learned how to find most locations now on the device, but still occasionally have to use Google for some rural areas in Vermont (which is unfortunate as most of Vermont has no cell service)

I love my Garmin even though I have a smartphone but it is at a disadvantage in that you can't possibly compare the power of a $200 standalone unit with the unfathomable processing power of Google which compensates and corrects for our incomplete addresses, erroneous information, etc. A standalone computer will never be equivalent to that of Google. That said, it has its advantages - just need to know the proper address. Personally, I love the Garmin Smartlink app. This allows me to enter it on my phone and then send it to the car Garmin via Bluetooth, ensuring that my address is correct. If not, I know I have an issue and/or can Google before I go.