[brucedawson]

I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed.

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.

[jonny_eh]

> I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed.

The friend's cousin did what they could have done themselves, use the feedback tool.

[brucedawson]

Right. I (the friend's cousin) did that. And two weeks after the changes were supposed to take effect the directions are still broken and the customers of this business are still inconvenienced.

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.

[jonny_eh]

> Most non-nerds don't know how to use the feedback tool. That is the reality.

100%, you've done all you can! I enjoyed the article, but was just remarking that you weren't technically needed to fix the issue. Either the feedback tool works, or it doesn't.

[stitched2gethr]

And yet some of the accepted changes still haven't taken affect.

[throw432196]

Your bio says that you are a programmer at google. That says a lot to how impossible the situation is to most people. Google maps has been telling me bs for years. When I lived in Cyprus, asking directions to a business would often lead to empty lots. I assumed it was caused by competitors sabotaging the database with bogus updates..