6 ms·

At some point about a year ago I noticed that I could no longer ask my Google Home devices "what's the weather?". I'd just get a generic "I don't understand" re

At some point about a year ago I noticed that I could no longer ask my Google Home devices "what's the weather?". I'd just get a generic "I don't understand" response. But more specific queries such as "What's the weather in Seattle?" would work. After a couple of weeks of this, I somehow got the idea that it was related to the devices' configured locations. And sure enough, telling the Home that I lived in the next city over fixed the problem. So I started a binary search and eventually found that the issue was limited to my ~10x20 block Seattle neighborhood - basically the outline shown when I search for its name in Google Maps. I then also realized that it applied to weather queries on my phone as well, but since the phone uses GPS rather than a specific location setting, I could only reproduce the broken and working behaviors by crossing one of the neighborhood boundary streets. Turns out it was some long-standing configuration issue with Knowledge Graph's entry for my neighborhood, and some recent code change in location-based weather queries began butting heads with it. Luckily I worked at Google at the time and was able to track down and pester people that could help fix the issue.

OkGoDoIt 6y ago
But if you had not worked at Google at the time, there’s basically zero chance you could’ve got anyone at the company to do anything about it.
- jvolkman 6y ago
  Yes. In this instance you're probably correct.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Deimorz 6y ago
  My address has been blatantly broken in Google Maps for years now. When you enter it, for some reason it deletes the house number and just looks up the street, which ends up pointing to somewhere about a 10 minute drive away. For example, if my address was "123 Elm Street" it just ignores the "123" and searches for "Elm Street" instead. We have to give special instructions all the time to delivery drivers and other people we give our address to, to warn them and make sure they don't end up going to the wrong place if they use Maps. I've sent feedback and error reports about this repeatedly, and even had a friend that knows someone that works on Maps pass it on to them directly. It's never been fixed, and I've basically just given up on it at this point. It's really shown me how impossible it is to get any kind of support from Google for even an extremely obvious, straightforward issue.
  - OriginalPenguin 6y ago
    Ironically your best bet to get it fixed is almost certainly to post your real address here as part of this thread.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - p1mrx 6y ago
      Or post another address with the same problem, assuming it affects the entire street.
      - Deimorz 6y ago
        It doesn't. Even the address for the other half of the duplex (my address + 2) works fine. Sometimes we just provide that address instead and catch the delivery people when they arrive, because it's easier than worrying about the Maps issue.
  - bgruber 6y ago
    I had an issue with my own address on google maps (not as severe as this, it just had the wrong zipcode). After trying to correct it using the tools built in to maps 3 times and having my correction rejected every time, I tweeted my complaint @googlemaps, did a quick DM back and forth and it was fixed shortly thereafter. (please do not take this as an endorsement of google maps support, merely an anecdote of what did work for me that I hope might help you)
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago
    Same here. Delivery people who have never been to my house consistently go to my neighbor's house a mile away because that's where Google sends them. What's so frustrating about this is that both houses have very clear address markers on the street. But people now trust Google more than they trust actual address signs IRL.
- iso1210 6y ago
  Write a blog and post it to HN, hopefully you'll gain traction
- cannam 6y ago
  Reminds me of when I worked at Yahoo, for not very long in the early 2000s. Yahoo had a consumer product called My Yahoo, a customisable home page with various feeds in it, and at the time they also had a My Yahoo Enterprise Edition, which they tried to sell to companies to serve as an intranet home page. I worked (in a junior sort of way) on the European deployments of MYEE. Anyway, one of our customers - representing a company in Germany I think - filed a bug report that said something like "Weather module hasn't updated since January". They'd been going to their fancy intranet home page and seeing the same weather for months at a time. And this bug report just sat there. For a mixture of technical and political reasons, there seemed to be nobody in the European office able to pick up this report and do anything meaningful with it. We knew about it, we knew that what we were serving to paying customers was hopeless, but we somehow couldn't get our hooks into the right point in the Weather feed to figure out where it was going wrong. Or, collectively, we didn't care enough.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    You could replace Yahoo with any other company and this would be equally true.
  - smabie 6y ago
    If this had happened at some of the other places I have worked, the CEO would have made all the developers stay in the office until the problem was fixed. Why did no one care?
    - antipaul 6y ago
      Don't have to name them, but what kind of places are these that care? Big, small, tech, non-tech? Locations?
      - smabie 6y ago
        Well, for me, it was finance where you know each and everyone of your clients by name because each of them is paying millions of dollars a year for your product. The company had around 50 employees and a 200m valuation.
lowdose 6y ago
For your neighborhood or was this a more structural problem and did your collegeas find more locations with similar issues?
- jvolkman 6y ago
  IIRC it had something to do with the parent hierarchy of my neighborhood. It was parented by both a postal code and a city, or something. I'm probably making that up, but I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it is to create and maintain abstractions for every possible geographic situation. I wasn't aware of any other occurrences.
  - DenisM 6y ago
    Not only a zip code can span cities, a single city/zip can span multiple tax authorities e.g. parts of Redmond, WA zip code 98052 are under Regional Transit Authority and others are not. I think that pretty much any assumption we're making about strict hierarchy are bound to be broken at some point.
    - llbeansandrice 6y ago
      I worked with zip codes on a project. Zip codes are a nightmare. They cross everything. There are zip codes which cross state-lines. Zip codes which are not a single contiguous area of land. So many issues.
      - reaperducer 6y ago
        I feel your pain. It turns out there are even a group of ZIP codes that apply only to specific businesses, buildings, or even people (if you're important enough).
      - jimktrains2 6y ago
        That's because zip codes aren't defined by an area, but by postal routes.
  - 6y ago
kempbellt 6y ago
What if you asked Google "what's the weather?" and it gave you a dictionary response of "weather" as an answer? Or with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside". "What is the weather report for today/this week?" is a more accurate question, despite an annoying amount of verbosity. But answers are still given relatively. "Cloudy" could be an accurate answer, for now. But it will be "Sunny" this afternoon. Some people will prefer a one word answer to "What's the weather?". Others, will want an hourly breakdown of the day displayed on their screen. Others, might prefer a week. It's hard to give an ideal response for every situation. Ironically, if I say "Hey Siri, weather" I usually get what I need.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Or with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside". One of my meteorologist friends always answers "What's the weather?" with, "The state of the atmosphere."
  - hanche 6y ago
    “What's the time?” “What's up?” The possibilities are endless.
- rdlw 6y ago
  > What if you asked Google "what's the weather?" and ... with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside". Now that you mention it, I find it strange that voice assistants don't give natural responses when they encounter an error. It would make them seem more real, and it would be less frustrating. When you ask a human what the weather is and they tell you to look outside, you don't try to rephrase the question in a way that will make them give you the right answer, you just realize this is not the way to get an answer and you look for another way. Maybe this isn't the best way for it to work in this case, since there is a different thing you can ask to get the response you want, but maybe this would make interactions better if, say, the phone can't detect your location. "Where did you want the weather for? I think I'm lost." Of course, the other problem is that if it gives the same response every time it'll get grating. The hundredth time you hear "Look outside," it has probably lost its charm. I wonder how possible it would be to generate responses that take into account all previous conversations, so that this doesn't happen.
teacpde 6y ago
That’s a fun experience to debug a problem, I bet if that problem goes thru customer service, it probably will not unfold and let alone a fix.

OkGoDoIt 6y ago

But if you had not worked at Google at the time, there’s basically zero chance you could’ve got anyone at the company to do anything about it.

jvolkman 6y ago
Yes. In this instance you're probably correct.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Deimorz 6y ago
My address has been blatantly broken in Google Maps for years now. When you enter it, for some reason it deletes the house number and just looks up the street, which ends up pointing to somewhere about a 10 minute drive away. For example, if my address was "123 Elm Street" it just ignores the "123" and searches for "Elm Street" instead. We have to give special instructions all the time to delivery drivers and other people we give our address to, to warn them and make sure they don't end up going to the wrong place if they use Maps. I've sent feedback and error reports about this repeatedly, and even had a friend that knows someone that works on Maps pass it on to them directly. It's never been fixed, and I've basically just given up on it at this point. It's really shown me how impossible it is to get any kind of support from Google for even an extremely obvious, straightforward issue.
- OriginalPenguin 6y ago
  Ironically your best bet to get it fixed is almost certainly to post your real address here as part of this thread.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - p1mrx 6y ago
    Or post another address with the same problem, assuming it affects the entire street.
    - Deimorz 6y ago
      It doesn't. Even the address for the other half of the duplex (my address + 2) works fine. Sometimes we just provide that address instead and catch the delivery people when they arrive, because it's easier than worrying about the Maps issue.
- bgruber 6y ago
  I had an issue with my own address on google maps (not as severe as this, it just had the wrong zipcode). After trying to correct it using the tools built in to maps 3 times and having my correction rejected every time, I tweeted my complaint @googlemaps, did a quick DM back and forth and it was fixed shortly thereafter. (please do not take this as an endorsement of google maps support, merely an anecdote of what did work for me that I hope might help you)
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  Same here. Delivery people who have never been to my house consistently go to my neighbor's house a mile away because that's where Google sends them. What's so frustrating about this is that both houses have very clear address markers on the street. But people now trust Google more than they trust actual address signs IRL.
iso1210 6y ago
Write a blog and post it to HN, hopefully you'll gain traction
cannam 6y ago
Reminds me of when I worked at Yahoo, for not very long in the early 2000s. Yahoo had a consumer product called My Yahoo, a customisable home page with various feeds in it, and at the time they also had a My Yahoo Enterprise Edition, which they tried to sell to companies to serve as an intranet home page. I worked (in a junior sort of way) on the European deployments of MYEE. Anyway, one of our customers - representing a company in Germany I think - filed a bug report that said something like "Weather module hasn't updated since January". They'd been going to their fancy intranet home page and seeing the same weather for months at a time. And this bug report just sat there. For a mixture of technical and political reasons, there seemed to be nobody in the European office able to pick up this report and do anything meaningful with it. We knew about it, we knew that what we were serving to paying customers was hopeless, but we somehow couldn't get our hooks into the right point in the Weather feed to figure out where it was going wrong. Or, collectively, we didn't care enough.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  You could replace Yahoo with any other company and this would be equally true.
- smabie 6y ago
  If this had happened at some of the other places I have worked, the CEO would have made all the developers stay in the office until the problem was fixed. Why did no one care?
  - antipaul 6y ago
    Don't have to name them, but what kind of places are these that care? Big, small, tech, non-tech? Locations?
    - smabie 6y ago
      Well, for me, it was finance where you know each and everyone of your clients by name because each of them is paying millions of dollars a year for your product. The company had around 50 employees and a 200m valuation.

lowdose 6y ago

For your neighborhood or was this a more structural problem and did your collegeas find more locations with similar issues?

jvolkman 6y ago
IIRC it had something to do with the parent hierarchy of my neighborhood. It was parented by both a postal code and a city, or something. I'm probably making that up, but I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it is to create and maintain abstractions for every possible geographic situation. I wasn't aware of any other occurrences.
- DenisM 6y ago
  Not only a zip code can span cities, a single city/zip can span multiple tax authorities e.g. parts of Redmond, WA zip code 98052 are under Regional Transit Authority and others are not. I think that pretty much any assumption we're making about strict hierarchy are bound to be broken at some point.
  - llbeansandrice 6y ago
    I worked with zip codes on a project. Zip codes are a nightmare. They cross everything. There are zip codes which cross state-lines. Zip codes which are not a single contiguous area of land. So many issues.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      I feel your pain. It turns out there are even a group of ZIP codes that apply only to specific businesses, buildings, or even people (if you're important enough).
    - jimktrains2 6y ago
      That's because zip codes aren't defined by an area, but by postal routes.
- 6y ago

kempbellt 6y ago

What if you asked Google "what's the weather?" and it gave you a dictionary response of "weather" as an answer? Or with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside". "What is the weather report for today/this week?" is a more accurate question, despite an annoying amount of verbosity. But answers are still given relatively. "Cloudy" could be an accurate answer, for now. But it will be "Sunny" this afternoon. Some people will prefer a one word answer to "What's the weather?". Others, will want an hourly breakdown of the day displayed on their screen. Others, might prefer a week. It's hard to give an ideal response for every situation. Ironically, if I say "Hey Siri, weather" I usually get what I need.

reaperducer 6y ago
Or with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside". One of my meteorologist friends always answers "What's the weather?" with, "The state of the atmosphere."
- hanche 6y ago
  “What's the time?” “What's up?” The possibilities are endless.
rdlw 6y ago
> What if you asked Google "what's the weather?" and ... with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside". Now that you mention it, I find it strange that voice assistants don't give natural responses when they encounter an error. It would make them seem more real, and it would be less frustrating. When you ask a human what the weather is and they tell you to look outside, you don't try to rephrase the question in a way that will make them give you the right answer, you just realize this is not the way to get an answer and you look for another way. Maybe this isn't the best way for it to work in this case, since there is a different thing you can ask to get the response you want, but maybe this would make interactions better if, say, the phone can't detect your location. "Where did you want the weather for? I think I'm lost." Of course, the other problem is that if it gives the same response every time it'll get grating. The hundredth time you hear "Look outside," it has probably lost its charm. I wonder how possible it would be to generate responses that take into account all previous conversations, so that this doesn't happen.

teacpde 6y ago

That’s a fun experience to debug a problem, I bet if that problem goes thru customer service, it probably will not unfold and let alone a fix.