17 ms·
Plus codes: addresses for everyone
- Phithagoras 8y agoWhy not just use Lat/Long? Or create a shortener for Lat/long if the long decimal numbers are too unwieldy for humans?
- ReverseCold 8y ago> Or create a shortener for Lat/long if the long decimal numbers are too unwieldy for humans? Like what? You can't shorten decimals without losing precision, and converting to, say, base64 is just as unusable by humans as plus codes. How would you shorten lat/long?
- et2o 8y agoI suppose every possible system will be imprecise to some extent. This system thus loses precision too. If you just found lat/long to x decimal places it seems like the same thing. However, I’m guessing plus codes allow you to express the same location more succinctly by expanding the character set from 0-9 to A-Z,0-9 and also structuring it with an area code. You can optionally drop the area code if you’re searching regionally.
- yardstick 8y agoBase 16 is shorter than base 10 but just as memorable. That would be a bit shorter. If you get rid of/consolidate the often confused characters (O/0, I/1/l), you can encode numbers into even smaller strings.
- myself248 8y agoGrid squares? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System On the air, I'm from EN82. That's a few counties. Enough for people to check a box and say they've contacted someone from this area, or spin their antenna to point more accurately towards my approximate location. If I need to give more detail, that becomes EN82KM which gets to city level, or EN82KM10, which gets down to just a few blocks. I could give two more digits and you'd be at my front door....
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8y agoThat's basically what plus codes do, plus some tricks (choosing the alphabet to make them unlikely to spell words to avoid offensive words, different algorithm for the last character, ...)
- Legogris 8y agoPlus codes is exactly what you are suggesting. Plus codes are generated from lat/long.
- maltalex 8y agoLooks like what3words [0], only less memorable. The Louvre in Plus codes:"V86P+C8, Paris" [1] The Louvre in what3words: "seasons.sharper.scan" [2] I'm much more likely to remember "seasons.sharper.scan" than "V86P+C8" 0: https://map.what3words.com/ https://map.what3words.com/ 1: https://plus.codes/8FW4V86P+C8 https://plus.codes/8FW4V86P+C8 2: https://map.what3words.com/seasons.sharper.scan https://map.what3words.com/seasons.sharper.scan
- lifthrasiir 8y agoBut you may instead remember "season.sharper.scan", which is 1453 km apart from the Louvre [1]. The what3words word list is deeply flawed. [1] https://map.what3words.com/season.sharper.scan https://map.what3words.com/season.sharper.scan
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8y agoTheir claimed solution when I read about this the last time was that similar words are designed to be very far off in order to make them obviously wrong, and showing similar addresses as a "did you mean" when you search for one. The FAQ entry is incredibly hard to find but it exists: https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/203066992-What-if-I-spell-or-say-a-word-incorrectly-or-get-the-words-in-the-wrong-order- https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/203066992-W... https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207065359-What-about-words-that-sound-the-same-or-with-variant-spellings- https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207065359-W... On their map, you have to accept their non-GDPR-compliant cookie "consent" form in order to get access to the real interface, otherwise the cookie notice covers it. Also, they have country-specific word lists. On one hand, that's nice because locals will be able to use it even if they're not familiar with the latin alphabet/the English language, on the other hand, it means you may be asked to search for misant.habiter.jaloux instead, at which point a plus code may become preferable. Their algorithm also seems to be incredibly complex, requiring a 20 MB library (likely wordlists + workarounds to make offensive codes less likely). Their web site does not explain how it works, and varies between claims that the words were assigned randomly and claims that they weren't (shorter words in more populated areas, similar words far apart). However, they've alleviated all need to discuss their technical benefits with their restrictive licensing approach, which guarantees that they will be unsuccessful while preventing anyone else from building a different approach based on words (both because it would create confusion and due to fear that they'll start costly lawsuits/claims).
- ReverseCold 8y agoAnother similar service (that I like better) is what3words. Unfortunately that's patented/proprietary, so no one will ever use it. Basically it splits the world into small squares, each defined by 3 common English words. Very easy to remember. https://patents.google.com/patent/CA2909524A1 https://patents.google.com/patent/CA2909524A1
- myself248 8y ago> patented/proprietary, so no one will ever use it. Actually, that means there's a bunch of money behind it, bribing carmakers to include it in their nav systems, etc. It's still shit, but it'll be ubiquitous shit.
- lifthrasiir 8y agoAnd there is at least one known instance of such system: many car navigation systems in Japan have support for Denso Mapcode [1]. Its algorithm is almost trivial but has a private mapping which effectively makes its entirty proprietary. [1] https://www.denso-communications.jp/mapcode/ https://www.denso-communications.jp/mapcode/
- mtmail 8y agoAnd Daimler was also bribed into becoming an investor in what3words? Maybe Daimler looked at the various options and chose the one best for marketing (best to convince end users, press, investors what it is). Easier to add celebrities and puns in ads similar to Apple Siri ads https://vimeo.com/250456705 https://vimeo.com/250456705
- goodstuff9 8y ago> No one will ever use it Tell that to aramex, dominos, Mercedes and united nations
- aw3c2 8y agoPrior art: https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-invented-and-published-before-this-patent-application-how-do-i-get-it-in https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-inve...
- goodstuff9 8y agoQuestion about this service and what3words- how do they home to gain traction?
- hackernudes 8y agoIn the case of plus codes, be developed by Google and be implemented on Google Maps (it is).
- cprecioso 8y agoI really liked this, but their current website doesn't help their cause. Their old website dropped you straight into the map to find out any place's Plus Code, as well as a box to enter a plus code and open that location in a number of mapping apps/websites (Google Maps, Apple Maps, HERE, OSM...). It looked useful at first glance. The new website looks like a standard marketing page that is trying to sell me something I don't need, and they have also lost the third-party linking. I think the immediacy of its usefulness is completely lost now.
- ReverseCold 8y agoGoogle Maps supports it, so I think they're assuming most people will just use that now.
- BonesJustice 8y agoInterestingly, if I drop my plus code into Google, it shows a pin in exactly the right location. But tapping the map graphic opens up the Google Maps app, which jumps to a location ~200 miles away.
- rntksi 8y agoIt did that for me too. I found out afterwards that plus codes have two forms, a short and long. If you enter just the short form, it won't be accurate without the ", city" part (e.g. 2A6A+1Q is short form, must be entered like "2A6A+1Q, Beijing", long form of that would have another 4-5 letters in front e.g. 7XQW2A6A+1Q)
- lighttower 8y agoI've always wanted a system that accounts for adjacent physical locations appearing to be far apart upon truncation because they happen to sit on opposite sides of the imaginary dividing line. E.g. 39.99 deg North looks very far from 40.00 deg North upon truncation
- Gaelan 8y agoOut of curiousity, how would you solve that? Seems unavoidable to me.
- lighttower 8y agoYou would need to use two simultaneous coordinate systems. It could be long lat p and long lat with an offset. If the offset version does not change as many digits as the standard then use that one. station curious and so much for machines, where the calculation is cheap. But it's for when you are trying to figure out if someone is next to you on a map or not. All of the coordinate systems that are grid-based including UTM have this problem.
- lucb1e 8y agoI made this but for prices: I felt like I was subconsciously biased towards products priced just below some boundary. When looking at products, you don't necessarily come across them in order, and the prices are not always round (not just decimally round but I'd also say that 501 bucks is not round). Take the series 931, 900, 942, 878: at a glance (without carefully comparing them) I find it hard to know the relative differences. To solve this, I made this which calculates the relative difference on the scale of 10 to 20: http://lucb1e.com/rp/js/scale.htm http://lucb1e.com/rp/js/scale.htm For coordinates, if you have point A at 39.99, point B at 40.00, and point C at 41.00, then this tool will show you that the relative distances are 10, 10.1 and 20. There is a huge gap between B and C, relative to between A and B. I must say that I was surprised to see that it places B so low (only .1 from the base value), so my subconscious bias already shows!
- crazygringo 8y agoI've never been clear on what plus codes are for... or if anyone is adopting them. Wikipedia says: > Open Location Codes are a way of encoding location into a form that is easier to use than showing coordinates in the usual form of latitude and longitude. They are designed to be used like street addresses, and may be especially useful in places where there is no formal system to identify buildings, such as street names, house numbers, and post codes. They don't seem all that much more useful than lat/lon for displaying/copying/pasting... But for replacing addresses, there's no obvious 1-1 correspondance between a plus code and a building. A large building may span 20 or more plus codes, so which one would you use? Multiple homes might lie in the same one. Another house might be halfway in one and halfway in another. Even the front door can be right on the boundary. Is there anywhere in the world where it's used for postal delivery, or anything practical at all?
- firasd 8y agoI think it can be useful for communicating emergency location... but yes it seems like you would need your GPS on in which case it's better if your phone just texts or otherwise shares the location with whomever needs it. Maybe it's good for sharing location verbally over a call.
- class4behavior 8y agoI think, it is similar what hexadecimal is to binary. It is its human-readable nature that is useful, yet, it is not immediately apparent how so--especially to the layman. OLC is also not the same as a GPS coordinate. What you get is not a point but a block, the size of which you can decide.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- evv 8y agoThe purpose of pulse codes are explained on the very first line of the linked page. (emphasis mine) > A plus code is like a street address for people or places that don't have one. Not everybody has a stable living situation at a building with a fixed address. Yet it's extremely important for people to be able to receive mail or packages, especially for people attempting to lift themselves out of poverty. This system doesn't look like a replacement to the existing address system, they can both be used. But as you point out, it won't matter much until people start to adopt this as a standard.
- neals 8y agoWhat if I live on the third floor, apartment 3A?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- alangpierce 8y agoSee "What about floor numbers and apartment numbers?" in their FAQ: https://plus.codes/faq https://plus.codes/faq
- djwbrown 8y agoSchemes for international geocoding really shouldn't shrug off this altitude problem. When you say third floor, are you using 0-indexing, or 1-indexed floors as in the US?
- mrmanner 8y agoIt’s quite likely that you already have a better working street address in that situation. If not, the address could be something like Name +code, city apartment 3A
- spilk 8y agoyet another MGRS
- lifthrasiir 8y agoIn the HN people always complain that geocode systems are hard to remember and/or write and praise "readable" or "memorable" systems like what3words. I'm of course a strong opponent to what3words for various grounds, but more importantly geocode systems do not necessarily have to be human-friendly. I think geocodes should be compared to ZIP codes, not something else. They both mainly act as a machine-readable version of (approximated or more accurate) human-readable addresses. No one complain about ZIP (or ZIP+4) codes being numeral. They do not, nor can't, replace human-readable addresses---even the most accurate geocodes will require a room number or a PO box number to be the true replacement (unless you are comfortable about calculating three-dimensional WGS 84 coordinates with 10cm accuracy and forcing poor post carriers to resolve them :-). They might have to be verbally communicated for the short period of time, so shorter, verbally distinguishable, verifiable codes do help, but that's not the biggest concern. If we already have ZIP codes, why do we need another system(s)? It certainly helps that: - Geocodes can be automatically generated from (now universal) WGS 84 coordinates. - Geocodes, once their algorithm is fixed, never change. - Many geocodes offer a trade-off between the length and accuracy. Moreover, this trade-off is generally predictable. - Some geocodes can be shortened and accurately recovered with the context (country or city). In this regard, after having seen a lot of alternatives, I do think plus codes are close to being optimal. But it should be mentioned that their applications are always limited to what ZIP codes and human-readable addresses can't and geocodes can. (Mongol Post's adoption of what3words is special because there is no permanent human-readable addresses for many mobile settlements. But what3words is not superior to other geocodes in this particular application.)
- 7952 8y agoAll an address really does is act as a set of instructions for a postal worker. It is not an explicit definition of location and can change over time. And mail companies will not necessarily maintain a database of the actual location of the letter box or door. It is enough to just follow the instructions. You need these kind of geocodes where a short instruction is not possible. A lot of Africa is like this. And maybe it could work for drone deliverys where you want to target an exact location.
- 8y ago
- alex_young 8y agoWhy is this better than geohash?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8y agoThe main reason is "because Google is behind it so it actually has a chance to become a thing". Otherwise, they're designed to be unlikely to generate offensive terms, and the + makes it feasible to use a shortened code together with a given or implied city name. Most of the improvements in this space are small details, because turning coordinates into a string is a really simple problem (which also attracts a lot of "let's reinvent this"...)
- nevi-me 8y agoAbout 5/6 years ago, a team of 2 South Africans got an idea, and called it Waytag, the # for locations. The idea was that you tag a location with whatever you want, e.g. bob.home, and anyone looking for it would use !bob.home. They had grand ambitions of licensing it to Google and the like. They patented it in a few countries (though there was prior art). Suffice to say, though they got a few companies involved, the idea fizzled into dust. I think in addition to bad implementation, the idea of license fees probably put people off using the system. I'm also aware of W3W, as there's been some discussion about it here in HN. I've seen +codes for a while on Google, but I've never needed to use them, as they look unfriendly to the mind. I personally think they're not as memorable as W3W, but if they are made/kept as an open standard, maybe they'll take off. Part of the problem is that many people who could benefit from codes in lieu of an address (I'm thinking informal settlements where there are no formal street names), might not directly be in reach of a mechanism to generate or use these codes.
- digitaLandscape 8y agoW3W is one of the stupidest proposals I've ever seen, because it's proprietary. We want everybody on earth to need to pay licensing fees and contact a remote API to resolve address? To call it mad would be far too kind. I may call it evil.
- newscracker 8y agoLast time I checked, which was a few months ago, Google Maps couldn’t understand a Plus Code and said it couldn’t find the place. Even at that point in time, this system was supposed to be working for quite sometime and supported by Google.
- mrb 8y agoGoogle Maps not only understand Plus Codes, but the mobile version displays it when selecting a location (not sure about the desktop version).
- newscracker 8y agoI just checked again by getting a Plus Code for one location from the Plus Codes site and pasting it into Google Maps on a desktop browser. Google Maps shows a totally different place for it. Something still seems to be broken.
- mallapur123 8y agoI live in India, my code once entered gives a location in Marathon, Greece!
- schoen 8y agoThere's a short form and a long form of the code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code#Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code#Usage https://plus.codes/howitworks https://plus.codes/howitworks
- known 8y agoDoes Amazon delivery guys use these codes?
- lucb1e 8y agoMy first question was: how does this differ from alphanumerically encoding coordinates? It has to convey the same amount of entropy after all. This[1] answer on the GIS StackExchange tells us that for a reasonably small area (small enough that it won't cover more than a small building, say 5 by 5 meters) we need 5 decimals. Since the longitude can have 360 major values, with 5 decimals each (so 360e5 possible values), we would need log(360e5)/log(10+26)=4.9 characters -- and since characters are a discrete value, we would need 5 characters. The longitude only has 180e5 values, but we still need 4.7 characters, so that makes 10 characters total in the worst case. For lower values, you need fewer characters, just like "21.491" is smaller than "121.491" (useful because the majority of the population does not live on the poles). As an example of geographic coordinates in alphanumeric: one of the most extreme coordinates you'll ever find (very close to the maximum of common values for earth's population) is 87e13,azebi, which maps to -43.81703,-176.47678. If we are okay with including symbols, we can convey more information, though to get under 5 characters for latitude and longitude in all cases, we'd need at least 78 distinct characters (there are 96 in the basic ASCII set, so that's doable, but case sensitivity is annoying). An example of the same coordinates would be hcFx,m^^c. Only eight characters for a fairly precise location on the globe: real short, but I'd argue that it's not more useful than the case-insensitive variant. While researching this, I realized that a good "human readable global address system" would not map 1:1 to coordinates because on the equator, one decimal (1e-5) difference is 1.1 meters on the ground, whereas in northern towns it would be much less. If you want to keep the codes as short as possible, it would be useful to leave a larger gap between each point of latitude the closer you get to the poles. This means they simply cannot be square. Looking at plus-codes, they are case-insensitive and indeed 10 characters (when omitting the plus -- I have no idea what that plus is for, other than making it longer by branding each tag). And they claim to be rectangular pieces of land. This is no better than a blind base conversion (base 10 to base 36). [1] https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/8674/9555 https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/8674/9555
- lifthrasiir 8y ago> I have no idea what that plus is for, other than making it longer by branding each tag You can safely omit the first few charcters when the context is clear. Plus there essentially acts as a decimal point (to the point that less significant plus codes should be padded to `+` with zeroes, which is the only occurrence of zeroes in this scheme).
- carapace 8y agoWith 64 bits you can address every cubic centimeter in the entire solar system. Probably not useful, but fun to think about.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Nokinside 8y agoPlus codes are nothing more than discrete encoding of latitude and longitude. Compared to MGRS its not more compact. I think using MGRS (Military Grid Reference System) is better already existing standard if you don't want to use digital decimals. No need invent something new for no gain. compare these three formats: 8GC2CMXR+X6 (14 m accuracy) -33.3333 -33.3333 (11 m accuracy) 4QFJ12346789 (10 m precision) First is plus code in default accuracy 14m, second is decimal degrees with 11 m precision and the third is MGRS with 10 m precision. Each of them is discrete and identifies roughly similar area uniquely. You can add or remove accuracy by adding more decimals or characters in all of them.
- bitwize 8y agoAh, plus codes, the GIS equivalent of Swatch's "Internet time". Stylish and perfectly, staggeringly useless.
- __initbrian__ 8y agoI like the idea of a universal addressing system but I don't think we've found the solution yet to this extremely difficult problem. Street addressing is nice because the addresses with the same street name are on the same street organized by number. (generally at least--there are example of streets that stop/restart) And the numbering is collinear with the direction of travel. i.e. I walk along the street. And I know I'll pass 11XY to get to 12XY. what3words was interesting but the words for the squares don't seem to be related to each other. From one square, I'd like to be able to generate the addresses of all the adjacent squares. (///jumped.spring.improving directly next to ///book.groups.hiking) and I can't generalize a larger square of w3w squares with an overarching set of words or something playing around with the plus codes, they seem to increment in a consistent way but I haven't figured out how e.g. (a random example) W->E: _+HJV _+HJW _+HJX _+HMR N->S: _+HMJ _+HMC _+HM6 _+HM2 I also like that I can change the address reference box size based on how many letters I have after the plus sign. In case I want to reference my front door versus my entire city. It'd be much easier filling out addresses in forms because I could type less info. But it'd be hard for me to associate a string on number letters to an area just in everyday life. Market St or Powell st carries more with it. And is streets aren't directly aligned with the boxes then that poses a difficulty. Edit: found their doc evaluating other methods [link](https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...)