9 ms·

Street address errors in Google Maps

147 points by brucedawson 1y ago

brucedawson 1y ago
Google 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 Maps team, and also to share what I found.
- swatcoder 1y ago
  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 result generator that's statistically deciding you mean something besides what you explicitly enterred and is giving you a route to a silently "corrected" address. We've seen that happening more and more in Search for years, silently ignoring keywords and directives without a "did you mean" callout, and it would seem natural for some product owner to be pushing an equivalent initiative in Maps. Aggregate metrics move the right way, so the company is happy, but of course the actual product experience sees a fractal failure pattern that nobody can quite address but makes results less and less reliable. I'd love to be wrong, though, as I think this would be a terrible advent for something that can be life-critical like a popular mapping tool.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    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.
- deleted 1y ago
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- cozzyd 1y ago
  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.
  - brucedawson 1y ago
    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 worthless) - lots of work yet to be done.
    - Fogest 1y ago
      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.
- Loughla 1y ago
  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.
  - echoangle 1y ago
    Could be copyright traps to detect unauthorized copying of the map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement
    - davidkwast 1y ago
      Good one. These are the real easter eggs
    - misswaterfairy 1y ago
      Map Men have a fun take on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI (Their whole series is brilliant too!)
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Four of them in basically the same spot?
      - aembleton 1y ago
        If they're all copied, then they've got a pretty good case that they'd been copied, and it couldn't have been an accident.
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        If you can copy one fake data point by accident, you can copy four. On the other hand, having such an exact match is clearly not a coincidence even if there's only one. So either way I don't see the value in having four.
7e 1y ago
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.
- sfn42 1y ago
  It's strange how different peoples experiences are. I use Google maps all the time and it's been years since it made any significant mistake for me.
- hu3 1y ago
  I don't recall last time Google Maps made a mistake for me. I'm sure it has messy data. I don't envy developers that have to work with geography or timezones. And Google Map devs have to work with both. Ouch.
  - criddell 1y ago
    Google Maps often has problems adding stops between where I am and where I’m going. I experience this the most when I’m driving cross country on an interstate and I search for restaurants. It often thinks I should turn around and drive back 5 miles to go to some restaurant that I’m guessing is paying Google to send it traffic. What I really I want are options between where I am to where I might be in 30 minutes.
    - db48x 1y ago
      That’s because it simply orders results based on distance from your location. That’s it. It just doesn’t have an ordering method that considers your route.
  - da_chicken 1y ago
    So, I've been in a position where I have helped do address verification for a school district. In some states, schools have to verify where students live because property taxes often pay for schools, so knowing where your students live determines your tax funding (and for missing children laws). I've worked with thousands of addresses now, and seen a lot of uncommon situations. Google Maps is really bad when streets are even slightly unusual. That's even with North American address conventions, which are extremely regular by comparison to many nations. For example, if you have both a North and a South version of a road, and the address numbering for North and South versions overlaps -- say, North and South begin at a county midline road and North increases going north and South increases going south -- it will irregularly put a pin on the wrong road or wrong segment of road. Similarly, it will be confused if you have River Rd and West River Rd. And it can be confused when Oak Ln becomes Oak Ct or insist that Oak Ct is really Oak Ln even when the road name actually changes. It also gets very confused by roads that have two names. For example if there's a county line road, the east county might call it "Franklin Rd" while the west county calls it "E County Line Rd." And in that case the east side of the road have one set of addresses, and the west have another set. Worse, the address numbers often don't align. Except that's not what Google screws up that often. Instead, Google will sometimes insist that one or the other road doesn't exist at all. It will say that 123 E County Line Rd is actually 123 Franklin Rd, and then it will put a pin where 123 would be on Franklin Rd if that road didn't begin its address numbering at 3000. Sometimes it insists the city is incorrect, too. If your address is "123 Miller Rd, New London" and New London is a tiny unincorporated town near Portland, Google might translate the name to "123 Miller Rd, Portland." Sometimes even when there's a street the next county over with an address "123 Miller Rd, Portland". In this case if you enter the Portland address, it will point you to the address actually in Portland, and if you put in the New London address, it will show you the New London address... but it will still correct your New London address to Portland. If you have a road with breaks in it, such as for a river without a bridge, it will occasionally just... put a pin at the end of one segment of the road and not find the address on the correct segment on the far side of the break. About the only things that's really consistent is: If you zoom in and the pin is in the middle of the road, then Google Maps probably can't find the address. On the other hand, if the pin is off the road, then it's probably exactly on the structure based on the local or municipal authority and their GIS data. In that case, Google found the address on the GIS data they got from that municipality. And you might say, "Oh, but those are really easily confusing things! It's entirely understandable." And, maybe that's true. But USPS's ZIP code finder still knows the addresses well enough to both find and correct them for you, and ArcGIS interfaces also seem to be able to find things much more easily. Google Maps was groundbreaking 20 years ago. But it really hasn't kept pace. The only thing that seems to confuse the other sites is new construction. At the very least, I wish Google Maps would be more clear when it's guessing rather than when it's found an exact match. All that is to say, yes, we did use Google Maps to help find addresses. But when things looked even a little weird, we assumed that Google Maps was wrong. And it usually was wrong in those cases. And what it got wrong was sometimes really, really wrong.
bombcar 1y ago
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 only 10th st types of things?
- ForOldHack 1y ago
  I was on Seoul for 18 months, and despite significant study, I have, never been able to decode their system despite at least 100 requests for some insights.
- Loughla 1y ago
  >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?
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Hey, at least they have numbers! In some areas the streets have no names, nor do the buildings have numbers. If there’s three streets and twelve houses, why do you need any of those?
  - pezezin 1y ago
    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.
sleepy_keita 1y ago
Adresses are notoriously hard, and it varies from country to country, and even within countries. I've been working on Japanese address data, and while you may be able to trust Google with an address in the city, there's a large probability that it'll send you somewhere else (sometimes > 10km) in rural areas.
precommunicator 1y ago
If you directly use Google Maps Geocoding API you will see in response there what type of address is it and is it precise location or estimation.
rs186 1y ago
Not sure it's related, but recently I tried to ask Google maps to find a way to a train station, and it confidently set the destination to the exit of a nearby highway. Yes, I double checked that I was using driving navigation, and it expected me to stop the car in the middle of the traffic. And I have no idea what to do about this. P.S. I never had good experience with reporting errors. Sometimes they are rejected despite absolutely being correct, or they end up having no effect at all.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  The correct way to report errors to Google is to publicly blog about it until it reaches the HN front page and some Google insider sees it.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  I've had this happen to me too. I would drive there, and while still on the highway Google says I've arrived. I don't stop the car in the middle of the traffic for obvious common sense reasons, I just switch to reading the signs nearby to get to the train station or the airport. When I grew up there wasn't turn-by-turn navigation at all, so I still treat it as merely an aid and not gospel.
xnx 1y ago
Hmm. I saw the behavior you describe, but I also got the expected directions: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YpVHhPf1U9Ytu6U86 https://maps.app.goo.gl/YpVHhPf1U9Ytu6U86
- brucedawson 1y ago
  Interesting. I don't know what it means but if I delete the postal code from the 138 address in the map you link to then it goes back to displaying the bad location (with the postal code restored). This smells like some weird caching, although I do most of my tests in an incognito window to minimize this.
ForOldHack 1y ago
Google maps knows nothing but what the programmers tell it. It's not self aware yet. The engineers, using Google colored bikes rely on a broken street system in Palo Alto. I rode a bike around the campus wiping Macintoshes.
aethr 1y ago
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 item makes it to the region where the delivery address is situated, the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination. Even if the city in the article has a well defined system, it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system. This is the problem that geocoding schemes (what3words, etc) are meant to solve, creating a single system that applies globally. But like many "rational" systems that attempt to replace entrenched practices, they struggle to gain traction.
- reaperman 1y ago
  Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses” https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298bbf0886 https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...
  - defrost 1y ago
    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.
    - makeitdouble 1y ago
      It also happens in places where a house/building spans two streets, and gets an address on both. Same reason some buildings get multiple numbers on the same street (happens a lot if they want to keep the option to later split entrances and give them numbers for instance)
cozzyd 1y ago
I've noticed some really strange lapses in transit directions as well, though there it might be more directly blamed on the source. Confusingly, for example, Google thinks it sometimes takes like 20 minutes for the metra electric to go from Van Buren to millennium stations (a distance of perhaps half a mile). What I believe is happening is it's using the departure time of the train from millennium station (it will layover for 15 minutes or so, presumably) as the arrival time.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  I do not know whether Maps shares data with the Waymo service, but their pathing has driven me bonkers for awhile now. Waymo is convinced that it is impossible for a pedestrian to walk from where I live to the east side of my lot (I live in multifamily, 300 units). Waymo seems to have pedestrian pathing in mind, and will block the app from a walk that is too far away. The landlady provides custom made pickup areas in the east lot, but Waymo keeps insisting on pickup and dropoff on the west side. Adding insult to injury, the “set on map” feature of dragging the pin has been broken as well. So I have to put up with it. I mean, they’re still in “testing phase” but I’ve given them such clear feedback, they are surely aware by now.
- deleted 1y ago
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standardUser 1y ago
I'm shocked at how bad Google handles street addresses in Europe and Latin America. I'll concede that some regions have bizzaro numbering conventions, but Google Maps has been around a long time now and those formats have stayed the same. If anything, the situation seems even worse on recent trips.
deleted 1y ago
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kccqzy 1y ago
If the author can use the Google Maps feedback tool to get the errors fixed, I'm pretty sure somewhere on the internet someone with malice can also use the same feedback tool to place the address at the wrong location. The only safeguard is probably a low-paid contractor in India reviewing these manual suggestions. One year ago the Elizabeth line disappeared from the maps in London. There are many Reddit posts about this such as https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1be01n3/where_has_the_elizabeth_line_gone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1be01n3/... and https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1b0xxb0/google_i_dont_salute_you_for_removing_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1b0xxb0/.... I asked a friend who worked at Google and they said that it was because some poor workers in India accidentally hid it while fixing something else.
- Twirrim 1y ago
  Someone did this a couple of years ago for a major thoroughfare near where I lived. They marked it as one way for a key stretch, and traffic ended up being re-routed down much smaller roads to avoid it. It caused all sorts of chaos, both due to the increased traffic on roads not made for it, and in the long queues that formed where the traffic then rejoined the thoroughfare. It took google at least the best part of a month to fix it (at least, it was around a month from when I submitted the correction, no idea if others beat me to it)
williamscales 1y ago
Google _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.
pianom4n 1y ago
"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.
- wat10000 1y ago
  The Pentagon's address even has the wrong state. The address is Washington, DC, but it's in Arlington, VA.
  - Calwestjobs 1y ago
    i heard that is original secret underground metro system entrance location !
- deleted 1y ago
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- mayneack 1y ago
  In much of unincorporated america, the most valid form of an address just uses the nearest city regardless of boundaries. Almost nowhere actually guarantees that every bit of land is even in a city limits. At the margins, addresses are unstructured free form text that is correct if it can be interpreted by a human with local knowledge.
- amluto 1y ago
  There’s also no particular reason to expect that an address corresponds to exactly one parcel or that any given parcel has an address at all or that any given parcel has at most one address.
- graywh 1y ago
  hundreds of people in my city-county really think they live in a city in the next county over just because of the "city" label on their zip code
- 1y ago
MattSteelblade 1y ago
In my case, at least Google Maps knows the city where I live. Apple Maps has my whole neighborhood in a nearby city.
- brigandish 1y ago
  I had similar problems until recently, now Apple Maps is better. I fully expect the situation to change again in future.
486sx33 1y ago
Seems like Vancouver is the problem
paulmooreparks 1y ago
Google does have a nearly impossible task making Maps work around the world, and I think it does an admirable job. One just has to have a bit of local knowledge to work around the quirks. For example, the walking directions Maps gives for Singapore are usually ridiculous. They're almost always twice the distance they need to be, since it's very common to cut through the open lower floor (void deck) of apartment buildings (HDB blocks) to get anywhere on foot here. I typically just use the walking directions to get a bearing, point the compass pointer toward the destination, and start walking in as nearly a straight line as I can, ignoring the circuitous path Maps suggests. Driving directions on the expressways here are also spotty. If I wait for Maps to tell me to exit the expressway, I'm already at or past the exit. I basically have to already kind of know where I'm going to make use of driving directions (you know, like we used to do with paper maps). Never mind that there are actual bugs in the directions: at one spot on the Ayer Rajah Expressway (AYE), if I need to exit onto the MCE, it tells me to exit onto the AYE, which is incorrect). Still, I guess it's better than nothing.
- paulmooreparks 1y ago
  And another one I just thought of: If I ask for driving directions to a mall or office building (here in Singapore, anyway), it nearly always sends me to the taxi drop-off, not the entrance to the carpark. I have to drop a pin on the carpark entrance (which presumes that I know where it is) to get sane directions. Otherwise, I end up on the wrong side of the building in gridlocked traffic trying to find the carpark.
  - brucedawson 1y ago
    That is a problem they haven't tried to solve. Driving directions could be for tax/ride-share or a person in their own car. If Google Maps doesn't even ask you which it is then it can't possibly reliably give you correct directions. I'd love to see that fixed.
- Twirrim 1y ago
  Google Maps can be downright dangerous in its lack of knowledge, and it'll make routing decisions that other GPS devices don't make (despite similarly working around the world). For example, it cannot comprehend the idea of country lanes in the UK, where e.g. TomTom can. Country lanes are narrow, twisty, and single file with passing places. But they're "national speed limit", or 60mph. You will never, ever go down one of these at 60mph. In most cases it's flat out impossible. Google Maps thinks you can go that fast. If enough people using google maps have been down it in the right time frame it'll know the road is slow and account for it in time calculations, and generally not send you down it. The fact that no one using google maps has ever managed to go down that lane at 60mph never seems to enter into its consideration. I've never had TomTom send me down a country lane unless it's literally the only way to get to where I'm going.
Calwestjobs 1y ago
Use Google Plus Codes OR Irish Eircode. street addresses are nonsensical prehistoric waste of database space.
- mjevans 1y ago
  Plus code also has the name 'Open Location Code', free to use, requires GPS or the ability to accurately generate such addresses. (Sufficient accuracy could be attained by plotting each intersection as a co-ordinate.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
  - Calwestjobs 1y ago
    yeah and i just realized how much of burden unicode is, in street addresses ... (is not needed in coordinate based systems.)
    - mjevans 1y ago
      If the 'addressee' is some human read blob that the shipping stuff and even postal carriers don't need to read, great. Heck it might be nice if everyone globally had their own UUID which could even get a lookup to 'current desired delivery address'. Re: Unicode Some sort of baseline protocol that just flattened everything out to what's really used and left behind anything remotely like Emoji ( E.G. Just 'single pen (monochrome imprint) compatible' Unicode ) might be useful enough. I will likely forever absolutely loath how UCS-2 ended up baked into UTF-8 and the Unicode namespace generally _forever_ so that it gets kneecapped at an arbitrary low page size and yet still majorly complicates decoders that have to map around that inanity. I think I'd want to review the 'Advanced Sub Station' bitstream format for inspiration of useful ways to extend 'font' operations. Any sort of 'color' or 'combining' operation would be relegated to _advanced_ / extended (not required) use cases and treated as a blob associated with either a single rune/character or a special meta character that denotes a sequence length. Among a bunch of other changes that would probably also include dropping UTF-8's 'resynchronize at next character' design in favor of some other mechanism that might include a simple checksum, and could change preferred encoding length at the next resynchronization.
trollbridge 1y ago
Google Maps decided my driveway is a road, and also gave it a (non-existent) name. I have attempted to update this information, but Google just rejects my suggestions as "not accepted". So we now regularly get people driving down here or trying to park, when it's actually just a one-lane driveway.
- graywh 1y ago
  double-check it on openstreetmap.org
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    It’s correct on there (and if it weren’t, I could fix it).
misswaterfairy 1y ago
I deal with addresses as part of my day job. The only consistent thing about addresses is that they're really not that consistent... It's not only Google that has this issue; but the nature of addressing in general. It's not uncommon for the geocoders we use to be hundreds of metres off of the actual location of the address.
jwr 1y ago
The real problem is that Google Maps isn't regulated like a utility. I know, I know, we all hate regulation, we love free markets, and all. But bear with me for a moment. I had a problem where Google Maps showed the wrong location for my address. I reported the issue. I was told the correction was accepted. But it wasn't — Google Maps would still show the wrong location. After doing this dance several times over a course of weeks going into months, it would sometimes show the correct location, and sometimes the wrong one. I once had two people arrive in the same car, and each of their phones showed a different location in Google Maps. The problem is that at this point Google Maps is so ubiquitous that people accept it as "truth". And that is a problem when it shows an incorrect location: people can't get to your place, package deliveries are delayed, etc. Unfortunately, things that are so ubiquitous in our lives require regulation — at the very least, Google should be required to process (and verify) requests for corrections in a timely manner.
- at_a_remove 1y ago
  I used to work mapping in EMS. It is absolutely not that simple, nor will it ever be. Yes, Google was often wrong. Sometimes I would drive out to a street to make sure I had not lost my mind. Sometimes, the local addressing authority was wrong, and I would have to prove it to them. "But it was checked!" It was checked wrong. Street numbers would be off by thousands. It would take some pointing out of obvious problems in the progression of numbers, plus a plat, plus an email from the building manager to prove to them that I knew what I was talking about. I was contacted by a woman who kept having drivers for all kinds of services attempt to use her driveway as a street, even if she had a sign up, which she did. Her local municipality was no help. Nobody was. She was irked and frantic, as these trucks would destroy her driveway, lawn, even garden. Much digging ensued. It turned out that the proximal source of the error was a statewide system, one of many which Google simply hoovers up and digests like a baleen whale siphoning up plankton, then digests and tries to "make work." I got the proximal source to make a correction, which they might publish in another three months. The original source of the error was a long-missing minor street from many decades ago, which I had to find in caches of searches and the like. It was idle curiosity, but it took me about twenty hours of digging on evenings and weekends. Address points are easy. Parcels, aka the polygons upon which zero to many address points might rest, are harder. Road networks are terrifically hard. I managed to catalog ten different cases of road discontinuity in the process of trying to find such things in an automatic fashion. And I might not be bright enough to have enumerated them all! And then we have cases of people who deliberately insist that their address number is "00." As in the first two-thirds of a certain not-so-secret agent's code number. Or imagine the fools who decide to put up a sign at the end of their long driveway and simply declare that it was a road. Each county has its own addressing standards, and included in each are addresses from the Olden Days, real wild west stuff, which the authorities are just itching to scrape out of their systems once and for all. Road addressing is Fractally Bad.
al2o3cr 1y ago
My favorite address WTF (from when I worked at a startup that managed deliveries) was an apartment building in New York City. If you tried to geocode the full address of an individual apartment (123 Someplace St Unit 789, etc) it would fail - but an address without the unit would succeed! This was particularly weird because normally the geocoder was fine with bogus unit numbers (eg on obvious single-family homes) but fell over in just this one case...
raylad 1y ago
I feel like Google Maps experienced a serious regression a few months ago. Before that, it would give reasonable mass transit directions in San Francisco. After that, it would always use a bus to go even 1 block to BART, giving drastically inflated transit times.
monktastic1 1y ago
Ha, I was in charge of data quality for Google Maps going on 15 years ago. Addresses were hard then, and I'm sure they're hard now. Alas, Google didn't want to invest in keeping this data high quality — a fact to which I actually owe my first promotion at the company (since taking over Maps data quality was a job that nobody else particularly wanted — nor did they want to move to Seattle, where Google wanted the team — but it still gave a lot of room for impact). Sometimes I dream of going back, but the culture has changed too much (and not for the better, I hear).
graywh 1y ago
can they at least fix the interstate highway exits it thinks are splits? why do I need to be told to keep left at random exits?
KnuthIsGod 1y ago
Dunning-Kruger effect on full display. Should be "the writer of this article has no idea how street addresses actually work in the real world".
sublinear 1y ago
> that’s 1.5 miles or 123 furlongs Surely that's a typo and supposed to be 12.3 furlongs? Even that might be slightly incorrect.
- brucedawson 1y ago
  Whoops! Good catch. That was supposed to be 12 furlongs. Apparently I have no intuitive sense of how long a furlong is so I didn't notice my typo
nitwit005 1y ago
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.
mastercheif 1y ago
I will give credit to the Google Maps team—they handle Queens NYC street address correctly. Apple Maps drives me nuts—it will only return search results if you include the hyphen in the four digit street address ie: "36-08 33rd St" vs "3608 33rd St". Google will hit on either query. The hyphen is a part of the "official" address. However, USPS has declared it unnecessary, there's no advantage to using it unless you're navigating by analog map, and it's a PITA to type on a mobile keyboard. So if anyone on Apple Maps team is here: please fix this. I filled a apple.com/feedback ticket on this years ago. For anyone interested in the peculiar history of Queens addresses—they convey a cross street and the number of the house ascending going northward. For example: 36-08 33rd St means that the house is on 33rd St, between 35th and 36th ave, and is house #08 on the block. https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm https://www.nydailynews.com/2011/08/21/balderdash-queens-residents-question-need-for-dash-in-postal-addresses/ https://www.nydailynews.com/2011/08/21/balderdash-queens-res... That said, Apple Maps is far superior to Google Maps for transit directions, at least in NYC. Google's integration with the MTA is seriously lacking—their directions often do not reflect scheduled changes in routes, let alone real-time issues. That said, Google Maps is superior with POI search and address decoding.
TrianguloY 1y ago
On my city there are a couple tram stops that were moved a decade or so ago. Google maps still show them at the old locations. All the comments say this, all the photos show this, even street view show it! But any time I send a change request it is rejected. I've always wondered who reviews the requests, if you are a local, or even spend 2 minutes checking, you'll notice the mistake...
jillesvangurp 1y ago
A person I know just got the keys to their newly built house. Both Apple and Google maps still feature the demolished building that used to be where the group of new houses are. The street plan hasn't been updated. The old industrial building was demolished several years ago. Openstreetmap already has the correct house outlines and the new street. I already warned them that deliveries might be tricky for a few weeks/months. Addressing is hard and errors are common. You can't blindly rely on maps to be correct or up to date.
xtiansimon 1y ago
Just yesterday I was dealing with an auto-formatter for addressing which was failing to record Queens, NY addresses correctly. Google Maps seems to have no problem. https://streeteasy.com/blog/queens-addresses-hyphenated-confusing-street-names/ https://streeteasy.com/blog/queens-addresses-hyphenated-conf...
tavioto 1y ago
Good post Bruce. I’ve run into a lot of the same issues you described, especially working with last-mile and delivery companies where the addresses are a total mess. Things like “123 Main St, red gate, call 555-1234 when you arrive, Apt 4B” are very common, and even Google struggles when there’s too much extra info mixed into the address. Because of that, I ended up building a tool called AddressHub that focuses mostly on cleaning up the input before sending it to geocoders. It tries to remove instructions, phone numbers, weird formatting, and fixes common spelling mistakes or street name variations. Then it sends the cleaned address through multiple geocoders, checks how close the results are to where they should be, and picks the best one. It also caches results when possible (depending on the API terms) and tries open data first to save costs. Only if open data does not have a good result, it falls back to the paid geocoders. This has helped a lot with reducing wrong deliveries caused by addresses that look fine at first glance but are actually way off. If anyone’s interested, the project is at www.address-hub.com. Always happy to get feedback if people have ideas for making it better.
evanstewart90 1y ago
what if the postal code is wrong on google maps compared to the one on government file? anything that opens up?
johnea 1y ago
If it's this bad in BC, I can't imagine how bad it is in Japan. The addresses there are notoriously local-centric, with knowledge of the area required, to find a physical location from the address. All that being said, I wonder how long it will take people to get the memo: Don't use Goggle! For anything! Unless you like being surveilled (there's a fetish for everything, I guess) I've used osmand on a (community build) android phone for about 8 years. It works great offline, all maps and the nav algorithm are in the phone, and it's gotten me to where I was going. I'm hoping to migrate full time to a linux phone this year. The mega-corps have contributed to the long wait for this tech, but it does seem on the verge of finally breaking out of the lab.
BrandoElFollito 1y ago
I once wanted to fix a gym position in Google Maps. I bike in front of it everyday. The response from GM was that they did an investigation and the address is correct. I replied to the dude in whatever country but not mine that I bike there daily and they even have a clean picture on street view. Then suddenly after a year, or if the blue, I got a Thanks To You It Is Fixed automated email. This is a weird company.

147 points by brucedawson 1y ago

Google 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 Maps team, and also to share what I found.

swatcoder 1y ago
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 result generator that's statistically deciding you mean something besides what you explicitly enterred and is giving you a route to a silently "corrected" address. We've seen that happening more and more in Search for years, silently ignoring keywords and directives without a "did you mean" callout, and it would seem natural for some product owner to be pushing an equivalent initiative in Maps. Aggregate metrics move the right way, so the company is happy, but of course the actual product experience sees a fractal failure pattern that nobody can quite address but makes results less and less reliable. I'd love to be wrong, though, as I think this would be a terrible advent for something that can be life-critical like a popular mapping tool.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  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.
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cozzyd 1y ago
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.
- brucedawson 1y ago
  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 worthless) - lots of work yet to be done.
  - Fogest 1y ago
    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.
Loughla 1y ago
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.
- echoangle 1y ago
  Could be copyright traps to detect unauthorized copying of the map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement
  - davidkwast 1y ago
    Good one. These are the real easter eggs
  - misswaterfairy 1y ago
    Map Men have a fun take on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI (Their whole series is brilliant too!)
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Four of them in basically the same spot?
    - aembleton 1y ago
      If they're all copied, then they've got a pretty good case that they'd been copied, and it couldn't have been an accident.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        If you can copy one fake data point by accident, you can copy four. On the other hand, having such an exact match is clearly not a coincidence even if there's only one. So either way I don't see the value in having four.

7e 1y ago

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.

sfn42 1y ago
It's strange how different peoples experiences are. I use Google maps all the time and it's been years since it made any significant mistake for me.
hu3 1y ago
I don't recall last time Google Maps made a mistake for me. I'm sure it has messy data. I don't envy developers that have to work with geography or timezones. And Google Map devs have to work with both. Ouch.
- criddell 1y ago
  Google Maps often has problems adding stops between where I am and where I’m going. I experience this the most when I’m driving cross country on an interstate and I search for restaurants. It often thinks I should turn around and drive back 5 miles to go to some restaurant that I’m guessing is paying Google to send it traffic. What I really I want are options between where I am to where I might be in 30 minutes.
  - db48x 1y ago
    That’s because it simply orders results based on distance from your location. That’s it. It just doesn’t have an ordering method that considers your route.
- da_chicken 1y ago
  So, I've been in a position where I have helped do address verification for a school district. In some states, schools have to verify where students live because property taxes often pay for schools, so knowing where your students live determines your tax funding (and for missing children laws). I've worked with thousands of addresses now, and seen a lot of uncommon situations. Google Maps is really bad when streets are even slightly unusual. That's even with North American address conventions, which are extremely regular by comparison to many nations. For example, if you have both a North and a South version of a road, and the address numbering for North and South versions overlaps -- say, North and South begin at a county midline road and North increases going north and South increases going south -- it will irregularly put a pin on the wrong road or wrong segment of road. Similarly, it will be confused if you have River Rd and West River Rd. And it can be confused when Oak Ln becomes Oak Ct or insist that Oak Ct is really Oak Ln even when the road name actually changes. It also gets very confused by roads that have two names. For example if there's a county line road, the east county might call it "Franklin Rd" while the west county calls it "E County Line Rd." And in that case the east side of the road have one set of addresses, and the west have another set. Worse, the address numbers often don't align. Except that's not what Google screws up that often. Instead, Google will sometimes insist that one or the other road doesn't exist at all. It will say that 123 E County Line Rd is actually 123 Franklin Rd, and then it will put a pin where 123 would be on Franklin Rd if that road didn't begin its address numbering at 3000. Sometimes it insists the city is incorrect, too. If your address is "123 Miller Rd, New London" and New London is a tiny unincorporated town near Portland, Google might translate the name to "123 Miller Rd, Portland." Sometimes even when there's a street the next county over with an address "123 Miller Rd, Portland". In this case if you enter the Portland address, it will point you to the address actually in Portland, and if you put in the New London address, it will show you the New London address... but it will still correct your New London address to Portland. If you have a road with breaks in it, such as for a river without a bridge, it will occasionally just... put a pin at the end of one segment of the road and not find the address on the correct segment on the far side of the break. About the only things that's really consistent is: If you zoom in and the pin is in the middle of the road, then Google Maps probably can't find the address. On the other hand, if the pin is off the road, then it's probably exactly on the structure based on the local or municipal authority and their GIS data. In that case, Google found the address on the GIS data they got from that municipality. And you might say, "Oh, but those are really easily confusing things! It's entirely understandable." And, maybe that's true. But USPS's ZIP code finder still knows the addresses well enough to both find and correct them for you, and ArcGIS interfaces also seem to be able to find things much more easily. Google Maps was groundbreaking 20 years ago. But it really hasn't kept pace. The only thing that seems to confuse the other sites is new construction. At the very least, I wish Google Maps would be more clear when it's guessing rather than when it's found an exact match. All that is to say, yes, we did use Google Maps to help find addresses. But when things looked even a little weird, we assumed that Google Maps was wrong. And it usually was wrong in those cases. And what it got wrong was sometimes really, really wrong.

bombcar 1y ago

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 only 10th st types of things?

ForOldHack 1y ago
I was on Seoul for 18 months, and despite significant study, I have, never been able to decode their system despite at least 100 requests for some insights.
Loughla 1y ago
>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?
- bombcar 1y ago
  Hey, at least they have numbers! In some areas the streets have no names, nor do the buildings have numbers. If there’s three streets and twelve houses, why do you need any of those?
- pezezin 1y ago
  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.

sleepy_keita 1y ago

Adresses are notoriously hard, and it varies from country to country, and even within countries. I've been working on Japanese address data, and while you may be able to trust Google with an address in the city, there's a large probability that it'll send you somewhere else (sometimes > 10km) in rural areas.

precommunicator 1y ago

If you directly use Google Maps Geocoding API you will see in response there what type of address is it and is it precise location or estimation.

rs186 1y ago

Not sure it's related, but recently I tried to ask Google maps to find a way to a train station, and it confidently set the destination to the exit of a nearby highway. Yes, I double checked that I was using driving navigation, and it expected me to stop the car in the middle of the traffic. And I have no idea what to do about this. P.S. I never had good experience with reporting errors. Sometimes they are rejected despite absolutely being correct, or they end up having no effect at all.

matheusmoreira 1y ago
The correct way to report errors to Google is to publicly blog about it until it reaches the HN front page and some Google insider sees it.
kccqzy 1y ago
I've had this happen to me too. I would drive there, and while still on the highway Google says I've arrived. I don't stop the car in the middle of the traffic for obvious common sense reasons, I just switch to reading the signs nearby to get to the train station or the airport. When I grew up there wasn't turn-by-turn navigation at all, so I still treat it as merely an aid and not gospel.

xnx 1y ago

Hmm. I saw the behavior you describe, but I also got the expected directions: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YpVHhPf1U9Ytu6U86 https://maps.app.goo.gl/YpVHhPf1U9Ytu6U86

brucedawson 1y ago
Interesting. I don't know what it means but if I delete the postal code from the 138 address in the map you link to then it goes back to displaying the bad location (with the postal code restored). This smells like some weird caching, although I do most of my tests in an incognito window to minimize this.

ForOldHack 1y ago

Google maps knows nothing but what the programmers tell it. It's not self aware yet. The engineers, using Google colored bikes rely on a broken street system in Palo Alto. I rode a bike around the campus wiping Macintoshes.

aethr 1y ago

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 item makes it to the region where the delivery address is situated, the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination. Even if the city in the article has a well defined system, it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system. This is the problem that geocoding schemes (what3words, etc) are meant to solve, creating a single system that applies globally. But like many "rational" systems that attempt to replace entrenched practices, they struggle to gain traction.

reaperman 1y ago
Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses” https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298bbf0886 https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...
- defrost 1y ago
  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.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    It also happens in places where a house/building spans two streets, and gets an address on both. Same reason some buildings get multiple numbers on the same street (happens a lot if they want to keep the option to later split entrances and give them numbers for instance)

cozzyd 1y ago

I've noticed some really strange lapses in transit directions as well, though there it might be more directly blamed on the source. Confusingly, for example, Google thinks it sometimes takes like 20 minutes for the metra electric to go from Van Buren to millennium stations (a distance of perhaps half a mile). What I believe is happening is it's using the departure time of the train from millennium station (it will layover for 15 minutes or so, presumably) as the arrival time.

AStonesThrow 1y ago
I do not know whether Maps shares data with the Waymo service, but their pathing has driven me bonkers for awhile now. Waymo is convinced that it is impossible for a pedestrian to walk from where I live to the east side of my lot (I live in multifamily, 300 units). Waymo seems to have pedestrian pathing in mind, and will block the app from a walk that is too far away. The landlady provides custom made pickup areas in the east lot, but Waymo keeps insisting on pickup and dropoff on the west side. Adding insult to injury, the “set on map” feature of dragging the pin has been broken as well. So I have to put up with it. I mean, they’re still in “testing phase” but I’ve given them such clear feedback, they are surely aware by now.
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standardUser 1y ago

I'm shocked at how bad Google handles street addresses in Europe and Latin America. I'll concede that some regions have bizzaro numbering conventions, but Google Maps has been around a long time now and those formats have stayed the same. If anything, the situation seems even worse on recent trips.

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kccqzy 1y ago

If the author can use the Google Maps feedback tool to get the errors fixed, I'm pretty sure somewhere on the internet someone with malice can also use the same feedback tool to place the address at the wrong location. The only safeguard is probably a low-paid contractor in India reviewing these manual suggestions. One year ago the Elizabeth line disappeared from the maps in London. There are many Reddit posts about this such as https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1be01n3/where_has_the_elizabeth_line_gone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1be01n3/... and https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1b0xxb0/google_i_dont_salute_you_for_removing_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1b0xxb0/.... I asked a friend who worked at Google and they said that it was because some poor workers in India accidentally hid it while fixing something else.

Twirrim 1y ago
Someone did this a couple of years ago for a major thoroughfare near where I lived. They marked it as one way for a key stretch, and traffic ended up being re-routed down much smaller roads to avoid it. It caused all sorts of chaos, both due to the increased traffic on roads not made for it, and in the long queues that formed where the traffic then rejoined the thoroughfare. It took google at least the best part of a month to fix it (at least, it was around a month from when I submitted the correction, no idea if others beat me to it)

williamscales 1y ago

Google _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.

pianom4n 1y ago

"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.

wat10000 1y ago
The Pentagon's address even has the wrong state. The address is Washington, DC, but it's in Arlington, VA.
- Calwestjobs 1y ago
  i heard that is original secret underground metro system entrance location !
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mayneack 1y ago
In much of unincorporated america, the most valid form of an address just uses the nearest city regardless of boundaries. Almost nowhere actually guarantees that every bit of land is even in a city limits. At the margins, addresses are unstructured free form text that is correct if it can be interpreted by a human with local knowledge.
amluto 1y ago
There’s also no particular reason to expect that an address corresponds to exactly one parcel or that any given parcel has an address at all or that any given parcel has at most one address.
graywh 1y ago
hundreds of people in my city-county really think they live in a city in the next county over just because of the "city" label on their zip code
1y ago

MattSteelblade 1y ago

In my case, at least Google Maps knows the city where I live. Apple Maps has my whole neighborhood in a nearby city.

brigandish 1y ago
I had similar problems until recently, now Apple Maps is better. I fully expect the situation to change again in future.

486sx33 1y ago

Seems like Vancouver is the problem

paulmooreparks 1y ago

Google does have a nearly impossible task making Maps work around the world, and I think it does an admirable job. One just has to have a bit of local knowledge to work around the quirks. For example, the walking directions Maps gives for Singapore are usually ridiculous. They're almost always twice the distance they need to be, since it's very common to cut through the open lower floor (void deck) of apartment buildings (HDB blocks) to get anywhere on foot here. I typically just use the walking directions to get a bearing, point the compass pointer toward the destination, and start walking in as nearly a straight line as I can, ignoring the circuitous path Maps suggests. Driving directions on the expressways here are also spotty. If I wait for Maps to tell me to exit the expressway, I'm already at or past the exit. I basically have to already kind of know where I'm going to make use of driving directions (you know, like we used to do with paper maps). Never mind that there are actual bugs in the directions: at one spot on the Ayer Rajah Expressway (AYE), if I need to exit onto the MCE, it tells me to exit onto the AYE, which is incorrect). Still, I guess it's better than nothing.

paulmooreparks 1y ago
And another one I just thought of: If I ask for driving directions to a mall or office building (here in Singapore, anyway), it nearly always sends me to the taxi drop-off, not the entrance to the carpark. I have to drop a pin on the carpark entrance (which presumes that I know where it is) to get sane directions. Otherwise, I end up on the wrong side of the building in gridlocked traffic trying to find the carpark.
- brucedawson 1y ago
  That is a problem they haven't tried to solve. Driving directions could be for tax/ride-share or a person in their own car. If Google Maps doesn't even ask you which it is then it can't possibly reliably give you correct directions. I'd love to see that fixed.
Twirrim 1y ago
Google Maps can be downright dangerous in its lack of knowledge, and it'll make routing decisions that other GPS devices don't make (despite similarly working around the world). For example, it cannot comprehend the idea of country lanes in the UK, where e.g. TomTom can. Country lanes are narrow, twisty, and single file with passing places. But they're "national speed limit", or 60mph. You will never, ever go down one of these at 60mph. In most cases it's flat out impossible. Google Maps thinks you can go that fast. If enough people using google maps have been down it in the right time frame it'll know the road is slow and account for it in time calculations, and generally not send you down it. The fact that no one using google maps has ever managed to go down that lane at 60mph never seems to enter into its consideration. I've never had TomTom send me down a country lane unless it's literally the only way to get to where I'm going.

Calwestjobs 1y ago

Use Google Plus Codes OR Irish Eircode. street addresses are nonsensical prehistoric waste of database space.

mjevans 1y ago
Plus code also has the name 'Open Location Code', free to use, requires GPS or the ability to accurately generate such addresses. (Sufficient accuracy could be attained by plotting each intersection as a co-ordinate.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
- Calwestjobs 1y ago
  yeah and i just realized how much of burden unicode is, in street addresses ... (is not needed in coordinate based systems.)
  - mjevans 1y ago
    If the 'addressee' is some human read blob that the shipping stuff and even postal carriers don't need to read, great. Heck it might be nice if everyone globally had their own UUID which could even get a lookup to 'current desired delivery address'. Re: Unicode Some sort of baseline protocol that just flattened everything out to what's really used and left behind anything remotely like Emoji ( E.G. Just 'single pen (monochrome imprint) compatible' Unicode ) might be useful enough. I will likely forever absolutely loath how UCS-2 ended up baked into UTF-8 and the Unicode namespace generally _forever_ so that it gets kneecapped at an arbitrary low page size and yet still majorly complicates decoders that have to map around that inanity. I think I'd want to review the 'Advanced Sub Station' bitstream format for inspiration of useful ways to extend 'font' operations. Any sort of 'color' or 'combining' operation would be relegated to _advanced_ / extended (not required) use cases and treated as a blob associated with either a single rune/character or a special meta character that denotes a sequence length. Among a bunch of other changes that would probably also include dropping UTF-8's 'resynchronize at next character' design in favor of some other mechanism that might include a simple checksum, and could change preferred encoding length at the next resynchronization.

trollbridge 1y ago

Google Maps decided my driveway is a road, and also gave it a (non-existent) name. I have attempted to update this information, but Google just rejects my suggestions as "not accepted". So we now regularly get people driving down here or trying to park, when it's actually just a one-lane driveway.

graywh 1y ago
double-check it on openstreetmap.org
- trollbridge 1y ago
  It’s correct on there (and if it weren’t, I could fix it).

misswaterfairy 1y ago

I deal with addresses as part of my day job. The only consistent thing about addresses is that they're really not that consistent... It's not only Google that has this issue; but the nature of addressing in general. It's not uncommon for the geocoders we use to be hundreds of metres off of the actual location of the address.

jwr 1y ago

The real problem is that Google Maps isn't regulated like a utility. I know, I know, we all hate regulation, we love free markets, and all. But bear with me for a moment. I had a problem where Google Maps showed the wrong location for my address. I reported the issue. I was told the correction was accepted. But it wasn't — Google Maps would still show the wrong location. After doing this dance several times over a course of weeks going into months, it would sometimes show the correct location, and sometimes the wrong one. I once had two people arrive in the same car, and each of their phones showed a different location in Google Maps. The problem is that at this point Google Maps is so ubiquitous that people accept it as "truth". And that is a problem when it shows an incorrect location: people can't get to your place, package deliveries are delayed, etc. Unfortunately, things that are so ubiquitous in our lives require regulation — at the very least, Google should be required to process (and verify) requests for corrections in a timely manner.

at_a_remove 1y ago
I used to work mapping in EMS. It is absolutely not that simple, nor will it ever be. Yes, Google was often wrong. Sometimes I would drive out to a street to make sure I had not lost my mind. Sometimes, the local addressing authority was wrong, and I would have to prove it to them. "But it was checked!" It was checked wrong. Street numbers would be off by thousands. It would take some pointing out of obvious problems in the progression of numbers, plus a plat, plus an email from the building manager to prove to them that I knew what I was talking about. I was contacted by a woman who kept having drivers for all kinds of services attempt to use her driveway as a street, even if she had a sign up, which she did. Her local municipality was no help. Nobody was. She was irked and frantic, as these trucks would destroy her driveway, lawn, even garden. Much digging ensued. It turned out that the proximal source of the error was a statewide system, one of many which Google simply hoovers up and digests like a baleen whale siphoning up plankton, then digests and tries to "make work." I got the proximal source to make a correction, which they might publish in another three months. The original source of the error was a long-missing minor street from many decades ago, which I had to find in caches of searches and the like. It was idle curiosity, but it took me about twenty hours of digging on evenings and weekends. Address points are easy. Parcels, aka the polygons upon which zero to many address points might rest, are harder. Road networks are terrifically hard. I managed to catalog ten different cases of road discontinuity in the process of trying to find such things in an automatic fashion. And I might not be bright enough to have enumerated them all! And then we have cases of people who deliberately insist that their address number is "00." As in the first two-thirds of a certain not-so-secret agent's code number. Or imagine the fools who decide to put up a sign at the end of their long driveway and simply declare that it was a road. Each county has its own addressing standards, and included in each are addresses from the Olden Days, real wild west stuff, which the authorities are just itching to scrape out of their systems once and for all. Road addressing is Fractally Bad.

al2o3cr 1y ago

My favorite address WTF (from when I worked at a startup that managed deliveries) was an apartment building in New York City. If you tried to geocode the full address of an individual apartment (123 Someplace St Unit 789, etc) it would fail - but an address without the unit would succeed! This was particularly weird because normally the geocoder was fine with bogus unit numbers (eg on obvious single-family homes) but fell over in just this one case...

raylad 1y ago

I feel like Google Maps experienced a serious regression a few months ago. Before that, it would give reasonable mass transit directions in San Francisco. After that, it would always use a bus to go even 1 block to BART, giving drastically inflated transit times.

monktastic1 1y ago

Ha, I was in charge of data quality for Google Maps going on 15 years ago. Addresses were hard then, and I'm sure they're hard now. Alas, Google didn't want to invest in keeping this data high quality — a fact to which I actually owe my first promotion at the company (since taking over Maps data quality was a job that nobody else particularly wanted — nor did they want to move to Seattle, where Google wanted the team — but it still gave a lot of room for impact). Sometimes I dream of going back, but the culture has changed too much (and not for the better, I hear).

graywh 1y ago

can they at least fix the interstate highway exits it thinks are splits? why do I need to be told to keep left at random exits?

KnuthIsGod 1y ago

Dunning-Kruger effect on full display. Should be "the writer of this article has no idea how street addresses actually work in the real world".

sublinear 1y ago

> that’s 1.5 miles or 123 furlongs Surely that's a typo and supposed to be 12.3 furlongs? Even that might be slightly incorrect.

brucedawson 1y ago
Whoops! Good catch. That was supposed to be 12 furlongs. Apparently I have no intuitive sense of how long a furlong is so I didn't notice my typo

nitwit005 1y ago

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.

mastercheif 1y ago

I will give credit to the Google Maps team—they handle Queens NYC street address correctly. Apple Maps drives me nuts—it will only return search results if you include the hyphen in the four digit street address ie: "36-08 33rd St" vs "3608 33rd St". Google will hit on either query. The hyphen is a part of the "official" address. However, USPS has declared it unnecessary, there's no advantage to using it unless you're navigating by analog map, and it's a PITA to type on a mobile keyboard. So if anyone on Apple Maps team is here: please fix this. I filled a apple.com/feedback ticket on this years ago. For anyone interested in the peculiar history of Queens addresses—they convey a cross street and the number of the house ascending going northward. For example: 36-08 33rd St means that the house is on 33rd St, between 35th and 36th ave, and is house #08 on the block. https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm https://www.nydailynews.com/2011/08/21/balderdash-queens-residents-question-need-for-dash-in-postal-addresses/ https://www.nydailynews.com/2011/08/21/balderdash-queens-res... That said, Apple Maps is far superior to Google Maps for transit directions, at least in NYC. Google's integration with the MTA is seriously lacking—their directions often do not reflect scheduled changes in routes, let alone real-time issues. That said, Google Maps is superior with POI search and address decoding.

TrianguloY 1y ago

On my city there are a couple tram stops that were moved a decade or so ago. Google maps still show them at the old locations. All the comments say this, all the photos show this, even street view show it! But any time I send a change request it is rejected. I've always wondered who reviews the requests, if you are a local, or even spend 2 minutes checking, you'll notice the mistake...

jillesvangurp 1y ago

A person I know just got the keys to their newly built house. Both Apple and Google maps still feature the demolished building that used to be where the group of new houses are. The street plan hasn't been updated. The old industrial building was demolished several years ago. Openstreetmap already has the correct house outlines and the new street. I already warned them that deliveries might be tricky for a few weeks/months. Addressing is hard and errors are common. You can't blindly rely on maps to be correct or up to date.

xtiansimon 1y ago

Just yesterday I was dealing with an auto-formatter for addressing which was failing to record Queens, NY addresses correctly. Google Maps seems to have no problem. https://streeteasy.com/blog/queens-addresses-hyphenated-confusing-street-names/ https://streeteasy.com/blog/queens-addresses-hyphenated-conf...

tavioto 1y ago

Good post Bruce. I’ve run into a lot of the same issues you described, especially working with last-mile and delivery companies where the addresses are a total mess. Things like “123 Main St, red gate, call 555-1234 when you arrive, Apt 4B” are very common, and even Google struggles when there’s too much extra info mixed into the address. Because of that, I ended up building a tool called AddressHub that focuses mostly on cleaning up the input before sending it to geocoders. It tries to remove instructions, phone numbers, weird formatting, and fixes common spelling mistakes or street name variations. Then it sends the cleaned address through multiple geocoders, checks how close the results are to where they should be, and picks the best one. It also caches results when possible (depending on the API terms) and tries open data first to save costs. Only if open data does not have a good result, it falls back to the paid geocoders. This has helped a lot with reducing wrong deliveries caused by addresses that look fine at first glance but are actually way off. If anyone’s interested, the project is at www.address-hub.com. Always happy to get feedback if people have ideas for making it better.

evanstewart90 1y ago

what if the postal code is wrong on google maps compared to the one on government file? anything that opens up?

johnea 1y ago

If it's this bad in BC, I can't imagine how bad it is in Japan. The addresses there are notoriously local-centric, with knowledge of the area required, to find a physical location from the address. All that being said, I wonder how long it will take people to get the memo: Don't use Goggle! For anything! Unless you like being surveilled (there's a fetish for everything, I guess) I've used osmand on a (community build) android phone for about 8 years. It works great offline, all maps and the nav algorithm are in the phone, and it's gotten me to where I was going. I'm hoping to migrate full time to a linux phone this year. The mega-corps have contributed to the long wait for this tech, but it does seem on the verge of finally breaking out of the lab.

BrandoElFollito 1y ago

I once wanted to fix a gym position in Google Maps. I bike in front of it everyday. The response from GM was that they did an investigation and the address is correct. I replied to the dude in whatever country but not mine that I bike there daily and they even have a clean picture on street view. Then suddenly after a year, or if the blue, I got a Thanks To You It Is Fixed automated email. This is a weird company.