[brucedawson]

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.

[Loughla]

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]

Could be copyright traps to detect unauthorized copying of the map:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement

[Loughla]

So the towns that show up did exist at one point in the 1800's and early 1900's for a couple. They were towns in the past, but aren't anymore. So I'm not sure they're paper towns. As I understand it, those never existed at all.

[misswaterfairy]

Map Men have a fun take on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI

(Their whole series is brilliant too!)

[Dylan16807]

Four of them in basically the same spot?

[aembleton]

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]

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.

[davidkwast]

Good one. These are the real easter eggs

[bombcar]

Various maps ingest almost random data - around where I am the street maps (plots) are about 50 feet diagonally off.

It’s entirely visible if you overlay satellite with the map, but it’ll probably never be fixed.

[cozzyd]

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]

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]

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.

[swatcoder]

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]

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.