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As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

nytimes.com

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Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#141

Post by reaperducer »

raldi wrote: post #113
reaperducer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your older Fiskhorn is no more 'right' than my new Fishkorn I'm not so sure. "Fiskhorn" was probably named after a person or family. Like The Bronx in New York. Changing it to "Fishkorn" erodes the neighborhood's history. If you've lived most of your life in newer states, you may be used to made up place names. But in older cities/towns/states, place names have meaning. Often historic meanings. Knowing a little bit a…

The Bronx was a corruption of the name of the Bronck family. Why do you see that change as more legitimate than Fishkorn?

Because "The Bronx" and "The Bronck's" are homonyms.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#142

Post by NoSirRah »

hyperberry wrote: post #127

Google puts far too much stock into the "accuracy" of its Maps data. Here's my fun story: in order to verify my dad's website with Google's 'My Business' service (now a defunct product?), they had to mail a physical postcard with PIN code to ensure the address was legitimate. Picking the mailing address was hooked into Maps/ Maps data; a "real" address had to be among their existing database of addresses. Well, my da…

Are either of these the Alt Road you're referring to?

https://www.google.com/maps/search/alternate+rd/@38.5320081,...

Looks like they might have updated it since then.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#143

Post by StudentStuff »

hyperberry wrote: post #127

Google puts far too much stock into the "accuracy" of its Maps data. Here's my fun story: in order to verify my dad's website with Google's 'My Business' service (now a defunct product?), they had to mail a physical postcard with PIN code to ensure the address was legitimate. Picking the mailing address was hooked into Maps/ Maps data; a "real" address had to be among their existing database of addresses. Well, my da…

The county couldn't care less what Google Maps shows. Outside large cities, Google Maps is often pretty inaccurate, just outside Seattle in Kitsap County, Google Maps has yet to gain the 300k renumbered addresses that the county put into place over the last five years. Makes Google Maps fairly useless except where locals have manually updated their favorite stores and the like.

The funny thing is, Google can get updated road info in a timely manner as most counties offer a weekly dump of their map data. Open Street Maps is often on point in rural areas due to pulling these weekly dumps, meanwhile the 3rd party vendors Google buys their address data from rarely pull down the publicly owned dataset, contributing to the shoddy quality of Google Maps outside most cities.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#144

Post by RyJones »

cbhl wrote: post #107

Google's San Francisco office is in "East Cut". The idea of divorcing "Google" from "Locals" is utterly ridiculous in our neighbourhood. This is one of the few places I'd expect Maps to actually be up-to-date with changes on the ground. San Francisco says it's a liberal city of immigrants, but unless you're born here and have lived here all your life somehow you're part of the evil "other" that is ruining the city an…

Google has an office in Kirkland, where I live, and I understand some folks work on Google Maps. The data in and around Kirkland is not great. I realized that people that live and work in Kirkland would probably have no reason to discover how bad the directions are - who would dogfood driving directions to the local office?

For years, several dozen points of interest in downtown Seattle were transposed into downtown Kirkland. It totally broke routing - if you tried to map a bus route from Kirkland to the Seattle Federal Building, it would give you a route that dumped you in a residential neighborhood in Kirkland.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#145

Post by NittLion78 »

jrockway wrote: post #76

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 typ…

This Google Map overlay is the best Chicago neighborhood map I've seen.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/1/viewer?msa=0&mid=13rPY3gTM...

My only real complaint with its accuracy is I recognize that Wicker Park extends north to the Bloomingdale Line, but otherwise, it's pretty good. It includes a lot of pocket neighborhoods like Palmer Square and the Wrigleyville portion of Lakeview, too.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#146

Post by cwmma »

Reminds me of the effort to get people in Boston to map the neighborhood boundaries

https://bostonography.com/2012/crowdsourced-neighborhood-bou...

You've got a weirder situation in Cambridge, where there are 'official neighborhoods' which everybody ignores (except for maybe Cambridgeport) and instead divides the city into squares.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#147

Post by j-c-hewitt »

xamuel wrote: post #131

Something else Google Maps does: it calls religious buildings "businesses" (if no-one has claimed them, then you'll see a "Claim this business" link when you click on them). This is a huge libel against those religions. Churches, mosques, synagogues, buddhist temples, all are "businesses" to Google.

It also calls government buildings businesses and other nonreligious nonprofits businesses. They're just using it as a generic way to say 'public building in our location database'.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#148

Post by raldi »

reaperducer wrote: post #141
raldi wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bronx was a corruption of the name of the Bronck family. Why do you see that change as more legitimate than Fishkorn?

Because "The Bronx" and "The Bronck's" are homonyms.

How do you feel about "Tribeca" and "Times Square"?

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#149

Post by kevinh »

_jal wrote: post #74
tyu100 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that name certainly wasn't the name the natives gave it before the Spanish expedition came around. Names change over time. Sometimes because of rebranding, sometimes because of hostile takeover of foreign land.

Call it what you want, but I don't see the point of being concerned over the change.

Re: As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume

#150

Post by munk-a »

mbell wrote: post #60
larkeith wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's somewhat problematic when Google starts to become an arbitrator of real-world boundaries, as there is functionally no oversight or recourse for those affected. Google was not appointed by the residents, is not incentivized to avoid damaging changes, and is functionally impossible to hold responsible - they're an opaque monolith to anyone who tries to effect change or revert their decisions, and their black box-e…

From the article: > 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. > Mr. Robinson said his team asked Google to add the East Cut to its maps. A Google spokeswoman said employees manually inserted the name after verifying it t…

I am strongly suspicious that the contingent of residents that hired the nonprofit is not all of the residents, and the people objecting to the new name decided to try and use google maps as their battle ground.

I am not trying to assign correctness, it might be that a developer came in and started the rebranding project to raise property values in objection to other residents, or the objectors might just be curmudgeons, the article doesn't provide enough information to tell.

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