I don't envy developers that have to work with geography or timezones. And Google Map devs have to work with both. Ouch.
What I really I want are options between where I am to where I might be in 30 minutes.
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.
Soon we can tell the younger generations that when we were young, Google was almost magic, it could find the most obscure stuff.. nowadays, not so much.
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?
Holy shit what an absolutely needless nightmare of a system. How do you expect people to find anything like that?
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?
- 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.
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.
This smells like some weird caching, although I do most of my tests in an incognito window to minimize this.
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.
https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...
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.
So as an example, if you use the UPSP Cities by ZIP Code to research 77005 and you would see that they recommend using the city name of “Houston” for mail, but they would also recognize “West University Place”. There’s also a city called “Southside Place” which should be avoided when it comes to sending mail. But then that kind of makes me think that if a house is within the limits of one or these small cities, then it could in theory have the same street name but have two different city values in different databases.
Then on the other hand there’s a somewhat related problem where a small town or village (e.g. Somers, WI and Scotland, CT) can have multiple ZIP codes and that ends up causing a lot of headaches for the residents of the town since they all might live nearby but then each section of the town might end up associated with some other larger city it’s closest to.
[1]: https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?citybyzipcode
That struck me, although I already knew that a ZIP code could span multiple cities and sometimes even states. I just thought there would be no confusion about which city name to use.
Not that there's a mailbox on the mailing address street. (There's only a small side profile of a house/yard on the mailing address street side). There doesn't seem to be a good reason for the mailing address.
This one affects me personally and it bugs me programmers think that they know better than I do about my address when I try and enter the city name and zip code, then they "correct" the city name based on the zip code and make it read only.
a) what was the point of me entering the city if you were going to fill it in anyway ?
b) this has happened in the last two cities I've lived and is dirt common around a major metro area in the United States. Stop autocorrecting user entered data, let them be wrong!
When merging records the old address, no longer valid with the local land management agency, still appears on old notices and on current state and or federal records (as land naming agencies are layered in some locales with changes taking time to perculate).
The old address is "the correct address" in the context of birth records, old newspaper articles, last years tax records, etc.
You're technically pedantically correct .. but in a manner that's moot when faced with the realities of day to day day reconciliation of meaning of text on an envelope or document.
Overall addresses are such a mess, and they are a mess even for governmental agencies like this one.
https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/news/new-national-vernacula...
It’s almost entirely impossible to order through Amazon et al using this type of system, it’s just not supported at all.
The same goes for my country or origin (in EU), they require my address in order to be able to send important mail. It’s just not possible because of the computer systems not accepting anything without a zipcode, address and house number.
I managed to find one site that would accept 'null' so the form would submit.
Making sure buildings are near the street listed, in the right range of numbers, is a system that works in most regions and should be encoded and used for checking data.
That's not the original ethos of Google: organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. I don't know about now but twenty years ago Google almost certainly thought it worthwhile to encode the rules of every regional system. Add that to Larry and Sergey's "healthy disregard for the impossible" I'm willing to bet that twenty years ago Google had almost certainly made it feasible to do just that: encode the rules of every regional system.
Does it have to encode them all? Why not start out with one then at least Google Maps is a little better for some.
Besides that, how many systems could there be? There are only something like 10,000 cities on the planet. That sounds like the kind of task Google is built to handle.
I live in a small country of ~2mio pop, and we have approximately 6000 settlements with streets and street addresses and many different standards of numberings, depending on many reason, mostly historic.
Technically yes, a few thousand systems could be programmed into some google processing engine, but you'd have to manually classify every road to set the correct system, and even there, you'd never know what is a legit numbering scheme or what is an error.
For example, Cucumber street 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 on one side of the street and Cucumber street 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 on the other is a valid numbering scheme. If #3 splits his front yard and builds another house, you'd get "3a" on that side. If #6 buys #8, demolishes one or both buildings and builds a bigger one, that could become either a "6" or an "8", and the other would be missing. Then #7 is demolished and an apartment building is built there with 4 entrances to 4 separate building sections, so those would be numbered 7a, 7b, 7c and 7d, even though they're in the same building. #5, #7 and #9 are also a part of the same building (three entrances), but the building is older, the street was renamed and renumbered some time after, and each of the entrances got its own number. Then you come to #10, which is also a building with 4 entrances, but #10 goes towards Cucumber street, and the other three are facing the Lettuce street and are thus Lettuce street 6, 6a and 6b. Notice starting with the "6" here and "7a" above, well, that's because #6 lettuce street existed before the building was expanded, it kept the #6 number, but since there used to be a shed on Cucumber street #7, the new building starts with 7a.
Good luck writing a general model for that.
Was that intentional, or just neat coincidence?
Sounds like you described the general model.
Anyway, if your little country is difficult for Google, they should probably skip it for now. Do New York first. Then L.A. Then Toronto. It doesn’t have to cover everything, just make things better for a meaningful number of people.
If my fixes had been published in the promised 24 hours then this blog post would not have been written but after two weeks this is the best idea I could come up with.
I think it is practical for Google Maps to understand the systems used in most major cities and then use this knowledge to reduce the number of errors.
I also think it is possible for the feedback system to work better. It does work sometimes, but it is slow and opaque and unreliable. It's even worse for bike directions.
The friend's cousin did what they could have done themselves, use the feedback tool.
So I wrote a blog post. It is yet to be determined if that will help or not.
Given that Google Maps understands the rules for street addresses in Vancouver it seems like the problem shouldn't have happened in the first place and should have been auto-corrected and the fix should have been quickly accepted. But none of that happened.
Most non-nerds don't know how to use the feedback tool. That is the reality.
I disagree, it's a requirement of being global. If you can't be global, don't. Meanwhile they have hundreds of thousands of engineers in their employ around the world, they have the scale to be correct.
I know this isn't what you said, but the idea that a small scrappy team of developers in one corner of the world can develop a system that works at all for the entire planet while dealing with the real world should be possible is just nonsensical. There's no reason Google can't be correct other than the fact it's unsexy to management that solving the problem involves hiring people who speak nearly every language on the planet and can connect and comply with enough governments around the world to get things right. Somehow that's not less surprising than sending cars everywhere to take photos of everyone's front doors without their consent.
This is literally true when talking about the entire planet, but this is Vancouver.
There are many geocoding systems that do just fine with the considerable range of addressing schemes in the developed world.
Something very weird is going on here, like Google finding a cheaper method for geocoding that is probabilistic and yields a level of errors they are ok with.
You know who knows this? The tax authority.
> the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.
Large freight does not work this way. I worked on top of a ski resort for a while. We had a mapped address right where the ski left let out instead of the base of the hill. In the summer you could drive up to it on an ATV easily and a pickup truck if it hadn't recently rained. Somehow a semi truck driver for a freight company got this address and mapped a route to it. We were quite surprised to see the 53' box truck driving up the side of the ski hill.
> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.
The information is encoded elsewhere and it's a bummer there is no incentive to make it as open and widely available as is possible. Although if delivery can rely only on partial information to "complete the next leg" then why can't address lookup do precisely the same thing?
Indeed... sometimes USPS even makes up their own "vanity city" names that don't exist. Or mailing addresses might use a different city name than where the house is physically located because of where the post office is physically located.
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.
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.
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/... and 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.
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.
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.
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.
So we now regularly get people driving down here or trying to park, when it's actually just a one-lane driveway.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Sometimes I dream of going back, but the culture has changed too much (and not for the better, I hear).
Should be "the writer of this article has no idea how street addresses actually work in the real world".
Surely that's a typo and supposed to be 12.3 furlongs? Even that might be slightly incorrect.
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.
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://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.
I've always wondered who reviews the requests, if you are a local, or even spend 2 minutes checking, you'll notice the mistake...
brucedawson•7h ago
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•6h ago
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•6h ago
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.
cozzyd•6h ago
brucedawson•5h ago
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•4h ago
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•6h ago
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•6h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement
davidkwast•6h ago
misswaterfairy•5h ago
(Their whole series is brilliant too!)
Dylan16807•5h ago
bombcar•6h ago
It’s entirely visible if you overlay satellite with the map, but it’ll probably never be fixed.