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by Gathering6678 71 days ago
It reminds me of what3words, using three words to describe any location on earth. I really hoped that could catch on.
2 comments

Kind of like what3words, except what3words uses three words which you stand a chance of remembering, whereas this produced, for an address similar to mine, "Miniature nerves eulogize gaily inside erect lion yet able stables hiss the conclusive consultation."
what3words Is terrible and search and rescue teams are actively against people using it.
Care to elaborate why? I'm just curious since I didn't know (1) there was actually any kind of serious usage, or (2) there was pushback from rescue team...
W3W is very aggressive about protecting their IP, they don't want it to be a standard anyone can use like lat/long.

They advertise it as being useful for search/rescue as you can provide a precise location over an unclear voice channel. They conveniently ignore that speaking numbers is clearer than speaking random words.

I'm sure there's more I'm unaware of.

One reason is that there are a lot of similar words in the dictionary. It is easy to mishear the wrong location especially when they are close together. Some of the words are long and complicated. Another is that they are random which means can't navigate from the codes.

They are missing feature of some codes that can have variable length for variable precision.

Yep local police partnered with them causing local SAR to go “don’t use it”

https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/local-news/whistler-search...

https://globalnews.ca/news/8258671/north-shore-rescue-what3w...

Basically the company wants to make money off it so are pushing it and it’s problematic due to it being less easy to use then standard gps cords, words sound the same, and most people have no idea what it is (and nor should they learn lat long)

> what3words Is terrible

Yes

> search and rescue teams are actively against people using it.

Sadly no

https://media.neas.nhs.uk/news/3-words-can-save-lives

The company pushes it hard and some fall for the marketing

But locally here most SAR teams are against it

https://globalnews.ca/news/8258671/north-shore-rescue-what3w...

https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/local-news/whistler-search...

seems like they’re quite against it going by what i found on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/searchandrescue/comments/1d63v94/wh...