Google Maps has declined remarkably two or three years. It’s now an ML-brained mess. Like the rest of Google. Apple Maps is actually better now! That’s incredible.
It used to suggest some good alternate results. Is it Turing complete?
Street address errors in Google Maps
31–40 of 165 posts
Re: Street address errors in Google Maps
#32Google Maps' database contains nonsensically placed addresses of non-existent buildings. Worse, however, is that it also contains entries for real buildings that are mapped blocks or kilometers away from their actual location, leading to real-life consequences. After two weeks of failing to fix the most significant error that I found I decided to blog about the issue in hopes of getting the attention of the Google Ma…
Really cool and thorough work! Thanks for sharing! My own first intuition is that it's not actually a data problem at all, and that "Google Maps has no concept of.." might simply reflect the ongoing, enshittening, transition from structured "concepts" to ML "vibes" for products like Google's. It's not that the underlying maps data store has the addresses wrong, but there's a layer between the input field and the resu…
While Google is no stranger to enshittification, I think Maps (and Contacts) are two services where it's just damn hard.
In particular it was developed in the western world from a startup, so the first approach probably was minimal and adapted to local streets, without even covering the edge cases.
Going from that to mapping every single address in the world is a huge leap and the underlying data system must be an incredible mess, also creating regressions on what used to be reliable.
I don't know if they got to it, but a few years ago you couldn't have vertical stacking (e.g. floors), shops with the same address needed workarounds to have a different entry.
Then some places have multiple addresses. The article talks about street numbers making sense, but in most places in the world they don't, disappear at random points, some countries don't have street names. We could talk about it years.
Re: Street address errors in Google Maps
#33In 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…
Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses” https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...
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 records with both the old and the new address.
Re: Street address errors in Google Maps
#34Google _could_ cross reference home addresses and home locations from phones with Google Maps.
They don’t need to understand how addresses work, just trust that most users have put in their home address correctly.
If we’re going to have all our data siphoned up and aggregated it would be nice if there were some useful side benefits.
Re: Street address errors in Google Maps
#35In 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
That's not the original ethos of Google: organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. I don't know about now but twenty years ago Google almost certainly thought it worthwhile to encode the rules of every regional system. Add that to Larry and Sergey's "healthy disregard for the impossible" I'm willing to bet that twenty years ago Google had almost certainly made it feasible to do just that: encode the rules of every regional system.
Re: Street address errors in Google Maps
#36"Is the parcel in the geographical bounds of the city name entered?"
The "city name" on an address isn't really a "city". SFO's address is "San Francisco, CA", but is not within SF city limits.
Queens NY addresses have "cities" that are just neighborhoods.
Applying any kind of logic to addresses will just be a minefield.
Re: Street address errors in Google Maps
#37In 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…
You're making the perfect be the enemy of the good. Making sure buildings are near the street listed, in the right range of numbers, is a system that works in most regions and should be encoded and used for checking data.
I wouldn't automatically assume that they don't have such checks. Checking an entry for reasonableness is a good idea, but it needs to be overrideable. Sometimes you'll need an entry that isn't actually reasonable by whatever definitions you use. And then you'll tend to have your workers get used to the override and not actually think about whether it might have a point.
Re: Street address errors in Google Maps
#38Google Maps' database contains nonsensically placed addresses of non-existent buildings. Worse, however, is that it also contains entries for real buildings that are mapped blocks or kilometers away from their actual location, leading to real-life consequences. After two weeks of failing to fix the most significant error that I found I decided to blog about the issue in hopes of getting the attention of the Google Ma…
Google maps also includes towns in rural areas that don't exist. There are 4 listed within 20 miles of my house that haven't existed for well over 100 years. They're not incorporated anymore, and they don't exist on any other maps, just Google. It's weird.
Could be copyright traps to detect unauthorized copying of the map:
Re: Street address errors in Google Maps
#39Google Maps' database contains nonsensically placed addresses of non-existent buildings. Worse, however, is that it also contains entries for real buildings that are mapped blocks or kilometers away from their actual location, leading to real-life consequences. After two weeks of failing to fix the most significant error that I found I decided to blog about the issue in hopes of getting the attention of the Google Ma…
Google maps also includes towns in rural areas that don't exist. There are 4 listed within 20 miles of my house that haven't existed for well over 100 years. They're not incorporated anymore, and they don't exist on any other maps, just Google. It's weird.
Various maps ingest almost random data - around where I am the street maps (plots) are about 50 feet diagonally off.
It’s entirely visible if you overlay satellite with the map, but it’ll probably never be fixed.
Re: Street address errors in Google Maps
#40In 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…
You're making the perfect be the enemy of the good. Making sure buildings are near the street listed, in the right range of numbers, is a system that works in most regions and should be encoded and used for checking data.
So who's responsible for then figuring out what nested regions, and nested regions of nested regions, and nested regions of nested regions of nested regions, that then does and doesn't apply to?