As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume • Hacker News Board

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#71

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

_lqaf wrote: post #67

antoncohen wrote: post #32

Why is this Google's fault? I walk through The East Cut nearly every day, and I admit I was confused by the rebranding. But it wasn't done by Google. There are people cleaning the sidewalks in East Cut shirts, banners that say East Cut, real estate companies that call it East Cut. It would be a little weird if Google ignored the name. Yes, "The East Cut" is a strange name. But that area as never part of South Beach (…

It is not the East Cut. It will never be the East Cut. That is Rincon, and the real-estate marketeers can bite me. Put another way, you can call things whatever you want, but a marketing campaign does not obligate me to accept your silly branding nonsense.

[deleted]

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#72

Post by tyu100 » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

huebnerob wrote: post #68

antoncohen wrote: post #32

Why is this Google's fault? I walk through The East Cut nearly every day, and I admit I was confused by the rebranding. But it wasn't done by Google. There are people cleaning the sidewalks in East Cut shirts, banners that say East Cut, real estate companies that call it East Cut. It would be a little weird if Google ignored the name. Yes, "The East Cut" is a strange name. But that area as never part of South Beach (…

Indeed, the article complains about names 'just being made up' but fails to provide any evidence of that actually happening. Instead, all the other odd names they call out actually originated somewhere in the community, albeit perhaps from esoteric sources. What's more, NYT seems to willfully ignore that place names change and evolve constantly through natural social processes just like these. That Google is indexing…

Yes, another article from the Times complaining that they don't get to make up neighbourhood names anymore ("newspapers used to disseminate new names") but Google does.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#73

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

I deal with this with one of the web sites I maintain.

I think, as noted in the article, that it seems Google sometimes uses names from advertisements as if they are canonical.

In my case, the city in question puts out a very specific, very legally defined map of each neighborhood, and has for more than a century. But real estate agents make up names for the neighborhoods, or fudge the boundaries to improve selling prices (thus commissions) and make their offerings more attractive.

About a year after a new neighborhood name is invented by a real estate agency, it starts showing up on Google maps. Then I have to deal with people complaining that our locations are mislabeled, because if it's on Google, it must be right.

It happens so often that I have an e-mail macro to respond to these people. And since the web site is very well respected by the locals, a couple of times a year I get requests from real estate agents, developers, and others, to change our maps to match their needs.

I got a particularly ridiculous one just this week saying that it's "our policy" (the real estate developer's) that maps should be drawn along a certain set of lines, and that we (the web site) are required to adhere to their policy.

I laughed.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#74

Post by _jal » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

tyu100 wrote: post #70

_lqaf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not the East Cut. It will never be the East Cut. That is Rincon, and the real-estate marketeers can bite me. Put another way, you can call things whatever you want, but a marketing campaign does not obligate me to accept your silly branding nonsense.

Rincon was almost certainly a real estate marketing name a hundred years ago.

No, it is named for Rincon Point, which took its name from Rincón, the Spanish word for 'corner'.

Bored cynicism kinda requires the underlying reality support one's cynicism.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#75

Post by oldManRiver » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

bcoates wrote: post #45

Heroically buried lede 80% of the way down: The East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group in San Francisco that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area. The nonprofit paid $68,000 to a “brand experience design company” to rebrand the district. [...] and one of the East Cut nonprofit’s board members is a Google employee. Inverted pyramid is for those other newspapers I guess

I worked in the "east cut" apparently. Outside of the Leaning Tower of San Francisco I don't remember a lot of people living in the area. Maybe they were farther south.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#76

Post by jrockway » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

I feel like the issue here is that there simply isn't any data that definitively maps out where neighborhoods are. I have never been certain where neighborhood boundaries are in any city I've lived in. I remember when I lived in Chicago I looked around for an official source and found one from the city... except the districts had no resemblance to what people were calling the neighborhoods. Meanwhile, real estate types always had very generous boundaries ("this isn't Cabrini Green, it's Lincoln Park" ok...).

Anyway, authoritative data could exist, but you'd have to collect it by survey and you'd have to get a lot of people to truthfully reply to the survey. No financial incentive exists to collect this data, apparently; wrong data sells condos (see the Cabrini Green quip above) and correct data gets you nothing except a map that more people agree with.

On some level, perhaps people read too much into neighborhoods. "I'm a good person because I live in neighborhood X." That is probably not an association worth making, but I think it exists because the reactions to wrong information in Google Maps apparently elicit so much vitriol.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#77

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 3:23 PM UTC

knockingat3am wrote: post #66

paidleaf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China is aware of this and they control any maps their citizens will ever see. Everyone is aware of it. Maps have always been political. Maps and borders are political creations. Why is it that whenever a controversial topic comes up, people always bring up china? Every HN thread that has a controversial topic, someone always sneaks in a reference to china? > "Of course all that ocean between Philippines and Vietna…

And like clockwork, China isn't even singled out, isn't mentioned first, but instantly it's pointed out how there's really nothing particularly bad going on there, for over half a century. Even bending so far to pretend this is a "controversial subject", and as if most controversial subjects didn't mention China at all. The latter is an easily demonstrable falsehood, uttered in the interest of discussion hygiene. You…

And there's also this:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-25/us-airlines-give-in-to...

China insisting that non-Chinese companies remove "Taiwan" as a nation from their web sites.

Some complied fully. Others, like Apple, geolocate the censorship:

http://fortune.com/2018/07/11/apple-taiwan-iphone-bug/

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#78

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 3:25 PM UTC

huebnerob wrote: post #68

antoncohen wrote: post #32

Why is this Google's fault? I walk through The East Cut nearly every day, and I admit I was confused by the rebranding. But it wasn't done by Google. There are people cleaning the sidewalks in East Cut shirts, banners that say East Cut, real estate companies that call it East Cut. It would be a little weird if Google ignored the name. Yes, "The East Cut" is a strange name. But that area as never part of South Beach (…

Indeed, the article complains about names 'just being made up' but fails to provide any evidence of that actually happening. Instead, all the other odd names they call out actually originated somewhere in the community, albeit perhaps from esoteric sources. What's more, NYT seems to willfully ignore that place names change and evolve constantly through natural social processes just like these. That Google is indexing…

> names 'just being made up'

Ultimately, is there any other possible source of names?

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#79

Post by joshuaheard » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 3:27 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #17

It's not just Google (though automation, through skimping on the hard-to-automate activity of effective verification, has clearly accelerated it.) Mapmakers insert small errors into their maps as a sort of watermark. In one case, a made-up place name was added to a map of the Adirondacks region of New York. When it appeared later on a rival's map, it turned out that the name had been adopted when a guy built a house…

I read an article about that a while ago. Apparently map makers were inserting fake towns into their maps to see if their maps had been wrongfully copied.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#80

Post by duxup » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 3:27 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #73

I deal with this with one of the web sites I maintain. I think, as noted in the article, that it seems Google sometimes uses names from advertisements as if they are canonical. In my case, the city in question puts out a very specific, very legally defined map of each neighborhood, and has for more than a century. But real estate agents make up names for the neighborhoods, or fudge the boundaries to improve selling p…

>I got a particularly ridiculous one just this week saying that it's "our policy" (the real estate developer's) that maps should be drawn along a certain set of lines, and that we (the web site) are required to adhere to their policy.

My mom says you should do something....