Street address errors in Google Maps • Hacker News Board

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#101

Post by Fogest » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 2:57 AM UTC

brucedawson wrote: post #79

cozzyd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that Google maps now tries sometimes to incorporate building entrances into walking directions. I wonder if misplaced building entrances may be part of the explanation.

It drives me crazy that Google Maps sometimes asks me where the entrance to a building is but it never seems to be clear about what it is asking. Where a pedestrian would enter? Where a car would enter? Driving directions are a wonderful thing but they need to account for whether you are arriving in a ride-share vehicle (please drop me at the front entrance) or in a car you need to park (the front entrance may be wor…

I have the same dilemma, but it has even more factors to consider such as different staff entrances and parking lots.

For example, at my work I enter on a different side of the building with my vehicle as a staff. When on foot there is also a different staff entrance than the public entrance. I actually often don't put in my work for navigating, I instead put in a manually saved set of coordinates of where the parking lot entrance is. Because it can make a difference on which way it suggests for navigation.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#102

Post by criddell » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 2:57 AM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #68

criddell wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system Does it have to encode them all? Why not start out with one then at least Google Maps is a little better for some. Besides that, how many systems could there be? There are only something like 10,000 cities on the planet. That sounds like the kind of task Google is built to handle.

Wait what? I live in a small country of ~2mio pop, and we have approximately 6000 settlements with streets and street addresses and many different standards of numberings, depending on many reason, mostly historic. Technically yes, a few thousand systems could be programmed into some google processing engine, but you'd have to manually classify every road to set the correct system, and even there, you'd never know wh…

> Good luck writing a general model for that.

Sounds like you described the general model.

Anyway, if your little country is difficult for Google, they should probably skip it for now. Do New York first. Then L.A. Then Toronto. It doesn’t have to cover everything, just make things better for a meaningful number of people.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#103

Post by duped » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 2:59 AM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #100

reaperman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses” https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...

Where I currently live, my street has no name, my house has no number. If a package is delivered by mail, my phone number needs to be put on the package, and the local delivery operator calls me to either pick it up, or I send my location through telegram and they deliver it to my house. It’s almost entirely impossible to order through Amazon et al using this type of system, it’s just not supported at all. The same g…

How do you specify your location? GPS coordinates?

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#104

Post by pezezin » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 3:01 AM UTC

Loughla wrote: post #24

bombcar wrote: post #4

I wonder if trying to support strange international address styles (like cities where the numbers on the street are in order of building permit issued, not ordinal from a center point) and/or trying to scan imagery for addresses is confusing it. The fact it gets the street wrong indicates a tokenization issue somewhere. Any evidence it happens to non-numeric streets like Main Street or Martin Luther Blvd, or is it on…

>like cities where the numbers on the street are in order of building permit issued Holy shit what an absolutely needless nightmare of a system. How do you expect people to find anything like that?

Japan is even worse than that, as they don't even use street names. The specific details depend on the municipality, but in summary:

- Municipalities are divided hierarchically into named neighborhoods, districts, wards, or "sections" (字/"aza", I don't know the correct translation). A single municipality might combine different kinds of divisions for historical reasons.

- Those are then divided into numbered blocks, plots, and buildings. The numbers are assigned in chronological order, and are rarely spatially sequential.

All in all, the system is extremely confusing, and the chaotic urban "planning" of most Japanese cities doesn't help. So how do people move around? They use maps; in the big cities like Tokyo there are street maps in all the major areas, otherwise you use your smartphone.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#105

Post by duped » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 3:02 AM UTC

layman51 wrote: post #67

defrost wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I skimmed and I think that's missing That a building|property will have only one address . Sometimes (eg: rural Australia) property addresses are updated from an older numbered lot based system (that goes astray when properties are subdivided and infill houses appear) to a system that numbers houses by driveway distance from last major intersection. For five or ten years a house can be recieving mail or be on the rec…

I think this idea that a building/property can have more than one address can happen in the United States too. The way I see it, it is because a ZIP code can be associated with a list of cities that are categorized as “recommended city name”, “other city names recognized for addresses in this zip code” and “city names to avoid”. [1] So as an example, if you use the UPSP Cities by ZIP Code to research 77005 and you wo…

> The way I see it, it is because a ZIP code can be associated with a list of cities that are categorized as “recommended city name”, “other city names recognized for addresses in this zip code” and “city names to avoid”. [1]

This one affects me personally and it bugs me programmers think that they know better than I do about my address when I try and enter the city name and zip code, then they "correct" the city name based on the zip code and make it read only.

a) what was the point of me entering the city if you were going to fill it in anyway ?

b) this has happened in the last two cities I've lived and is dirt common around a major metro area in the United States. Stop autocorrecting user entered data, let them be wrong!

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#106

Post by duped » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 3:04 AM UTC

aethr wrote: post #17

In the logistics industry the commonly held wisdom is that there really isn't any accepted system for "how street addresses work". Different countries have completely different systems, and even within a country there are often many different conventions. The thing that really matters in delivery is whether the address on the consignment has enough information for an operator to complete the next leg. By the time an…

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system

I disagree, it's a requirement of being global. If you can't be global, don't. Meanwhile they have hundreds of thousands of engineers in their employ around the world, they have the scale to be correct.

I know this isn't what you said, but the idea that a small scrappy team of developers in one corner of the world can develop a system that works at all for the entire planet while dealing with the real world should be possible is just nonsensical. There's no reason Google can't be correct other than the fact it's unsexy to management that solving the problem involves hiring people who speak nearly every language on the planet and can connect and comply with enough governments around the world to get things right. Somehow that's not less surprising than sending cars everywhere to take photos of everyone's front doors without their consent.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#107

Post by nitwit005 » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 3:05 AM UTC

This seems like an optimist, imagining an ordered world, which sadly does not exist.

Whatever assumption you think will always hold true for addresses, will not in practice. Even in places that appear strictly patterned.

The suggestion to guess addresses that "should exist" is just clearly wrong. If someone buys two plots of land and builds a larger building, an address normally vanishes.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#108

Post by stevage » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 3:05 AM UTC

aethr wrote: post #17

In the logistics industry the commonly held wisdom is that there really isn't any accepted system for "how street addresses work". Different countries have completely different systems, and even within a country there are often many different conventions. The thing that really matters in delivery is whether the address on the consignment has enough information for an operator to complete the next leg. By the time an…

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.

This is literally true when talking about the entire planet, but this is Vancouver.

There are many geocoding systems that do just fine with the considerable range of addressing schemes in the developed world.

Something very weird is going on here, like Google finding a cheaper method for geocoding that is probabilistic and yields a level of errors they are ok with.

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#109

Post by throw432196 » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 3:21 AM UTC

brucedawson wrote: post #53

aethr wrote: post #17

In the logistics industry the commonly held wisdom is that there really isn't any accepted system for "how street addresses work". Different countries have completely different systems, and even within a country there are often many different conventions. The thing that really matters in delivery is whether the address on the consignment has enough information for an operator to complete the next leg. By the time an…

I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed. If my fixes had been published in the promised 24 hours then this blog post would not have been written but after two weeks this is the best idea I could come up with. I think it is practical for Google M…

Your bio says that you are a programmer at google. That says a lot to how impossible the situation is to most people. Google maps has been telling me bs for years. When I lived in Cyprus, asking directions to a business would often lead to empty lots. I assumed it was caused by competitors sabotaging the database with bogus updates..

Re: Street address errors in Google Maps

#110

Post by rblatz » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 3:22 AM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #100

reaperman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses” https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...

Where I currently live, my street has no name, my house has no number. If a package is delivered by mail, my phone number needs to be put on the package, and the local delivery operator calls me to either pick it up, or I send my location through telegram and they deliver it to my house. It’s almost entirely impossible to order through Amazon et al using this type of system, it’s just not supported at all. The same g…

Why don’t you name your road and assign a house number? Either just make it up, or to make it more official contact your local government and propose a name and numbering scheme for it.