Comment by jvolkman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jvolkman | Hacker News Reader

At some point about a year ago I noticed that I could no longer ask my Google Home devices "what's the weather?". I'd just get a generic "I don't understand" response. But more specific queries such as "What's the weather in Seattle?" would work.

After a couple of weeks of this, I somehow got the idea that it was related to the devices' configured locations. And sure enough, telling the Home that I lived in the next city over fixed the problem.

So I started a binary search and eventually found that the issue was limited to my ~10x20 block Seattle neighborhood - basically the outline shown when I search for its name in Google Maps. I then also realized that it applied to weather queries on my phone as well, but since the phone uses GPS rather than a specific location setting, I could only reproduce the broken and working behaviors by crossing one of the neighborhood boundary streets.

Turns out it was some long-standing configuration issue with Knowledge Graph's entry for my neighborhood, and some recent code change in location-based weather queries began butting heads with it. Luckily I worked at Google at the time and was able to track down and pester people that could help fix the issue.

But if you had not worked at Google at the time, there’s basically zero chance you could’ve got anyone at the company to do anything about it.

Yes. In this instance you're probably correct.

My address has been blatantly broken in Google Maps for years now. When you enter it, for some reason it deletes the house number and just looks up the street, which ends up pointing to somewhere about a 10 minute drive away. For example, if my address was "123 Elm Street" it just ignores the "123" and searches for "Elm Street" instead. We have to give special instructions all the time to delivery drivers and other people we give our address to, to warn them and make sure they don't end up going to the wrong place if they use Maps.

I've sent feedback and error reports about this repeatedly, and even had a friend that knows someone that works on Maps pass it on to them directly. It's never been fixed, and I've basically just given up on it at this point. It's really shown me how impossible it is to get any kind of support from Google for even an extremely obvious, straightforward issue.

Ironically your best bet to get it fixed is almost certainly to post your real address here as part of this thread.

Or post another address with the same problem, assuming it affects the entire street.

It doesn't. Even the address for the other half of the duplex (my address + 2) works fine. Sometimes we just provide that address instead and catch the delivery people when they arrive, because it's easier than worrying about the Maps issue.

I had an issue with my own address on google maps (not as severe as this, it just had the wrong zipcode). After trying to correct it using the tools built in to maps 3 times and having my correction rejected every time, I tweeted my complaint @googlemaps, did a quick DM back and forth and it was fixed shortly thereafter.

(please do not take this as an endorsement of google maps support, merely an anecdote of what did work for me that I hope might help you)

Same here. Delivery people who have never been to my house consistently go to my neighbor's house a mile away because that's where Google sends them. What's so frustrating about this is that both houses have very clear address markers on the street. But people now trust Google more than they trust actual address signs IRL.

My address has been blatantly broken in Google Maps for years now

I recently moved, and found out that virtually every single web site from my credit cards to my bank to the library uses Google to verify address entry on the fly. The problem is that Google's database entry for my address is wrong. So any time I try to enter the address "123 Oak Street, Apartment Q" Google unhelpfully corrects it on the fly to "Oak Street, Suite 1." No amount of keyboard jockeying can override Google's on-the-fly autocorrection.

The solution I eventually came up with was to turn off javascript, then enter my correct address, then turn javascript back on to finish the rest of the form.

Of course, there's no way to contact Google about its error. Maybe in Google Maps? I dunno. How do you find an address that Google Maps doesn't know to tell it that the address it has is wrong?

A couple years ago, I sent a report to google maps about a small museum in a remote corner of Norway. The map had the location of this museum about a hundred meters off. Not long thereafter, I received a thank you note saying that indeed, it was wrong, but now they fixed it. And indeed they had. I suppose I should have been surprised at this success. Or maybe they were more responsive before.

I had issues with google maps being broken for the address when I moved in. I reported it too many times to count using the website.

In the end what worked for me was registering as google maps client/customer, reproducing the issue via API, and then reporting it as an API issue. The underlaying data was fixed within a day or two, and I got my emails answered by google engineer within (literally) minutes.

As a former Uber/Lyft driver, I probably ran into some kind of map error at least once every 8 hours of driving. These databases have a lot more garbage in them than I realized when I wasn't driving as much.

Curious if the address is correct in Apple Maps?

With Apple, I've submitted perhaps 5 corrections for 5 different (usually minor) problems in 5 years. Problems like a place claims to take Apple Pay when it doesn't. Or the actual place is across the street from where Maps claims it is.

In each case, Apple sends back a notification within 2-3 weeks saying they've fixed the problem, and when I've checked, it has always been resolved. Pretty happy with the service.

Well, this can be a feature rather than a bug if you like privacy. I knew a house that was on a large, mostly wooded piece of land where Google Maps would direct you to the wrong side of the property via a dead-end street in a development. If you went there, nothing but trees for a thousand feet or maybe two. Probably at least a 10 minute drive if you actually knew the street that the driveway connected to.

Huh, I've forgotten that I have the same problem with my address. If you look up my address, Maps will point to my house (let's label it X St. 36), but the street segment in front of my house has the name of the parallel street (Y St.) a block south of it. On Google Maps, X St. incorrectly changes to Y St. 100 or so meters before reaching my house...

As annoying as that sounds for a home address, imagine it being a business address. It would cost that business a lot of money.

I would suggest navigating to your home in maps and end up on the wrong address. When it asks for your feedback (nowadays it usually asks for it based on where you live), give it the lowest rating (the frowning smiley). In some regions, it will take you to another page asking you to write in detail what happened. Mention your story in there, hopefully, someone looking at bug reports will read through it.

Write a blog and post it to HN, hopefully you'll gain traction

Reminds me of when I worked at Yahoo, for not very long in the early 2000s. Yahoo had a consumer product called My Yahoo, a customisable home page with various feeds in it, and at the time they also had a My Yahoo Enterprise Edition, which they tried to sell to companies to serve as an intranet home page. I worked (in a junior sort of way) on the European deployments of MYEE.

Anyway, one of our customers - representing a company in Germany I think - filed a bug report that said something like "Weather module hasn't updated since January". They'd been going to their fancy intranet home page and seeing the same weather for months at a time.

And this bug report just sat there. For a mixture of technical and political reasons, there seemed to be nobody in the European office able to pick up this report and do anything meaningful with it. We knew about it, we knew that what we were serving to paying customers was hopeless, but we somehow couldn't get our hooks into the right point in the Weather feed to figure out where it was going wrong. Or, collectively, we didn't care enough.

You could replace Yahoo with any other company and this would be equally true.

If this had happened at some of the other places I have worked, the CEO would have made all the developers stay in the office until the problem was fixed. Why did no one care?

Don't have to name them, but what kind of places are these that care? Big, small, tech, non-tech? Locations?

Well, for me, it was finance where you know each and everyone of your clients by name because each of them is paying millions of dollars a year for your product. The company had around 50 employees and a 200m valuation.

That sounds like pretty bad places to work. And very bad internal processes.

To say no one cared is going too far, but it is interesting to think about why something like this was able to happen.

There were various technical and structural factors making it difficult to fix. Weather feeds were known to be problematic (still are I guess) and this code would have been surprisingly low-level C/C++ with custom serialisations and limited logging. Structurally there were problems in getting attention from a team in California to support a problem experienced by a different team in London, especially since it affected relatively few users - a tension in supporting paid products in a company that is focused on non-paying users at far greater scale.

(I am assuming this bug would have needed some actual development work - I don't recall, but I think we were familiar enough with common ops problems that it wasn't just a question of kicking one of our own feed servers.)

But I do think there was an issue about lack of concern - at heart we didn't have enough confidence in our own product to motivate the personal pain of working through these problems and getting them solved. I think that, if you had gathered us together and asked our collective opinion, we would have suggested that this customer would be better off not using our product at all - it simply wasn't ever likely to be good enough. Once you reach that way of thinking about your own product, it becomes extremely hard to countenance fixing the most difficult problems with it.

What if you asked Google "what's the weather?" and it gave you a dictionary response of "weather" as an answer? Or with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside".

"What is the weather report for today/this week?" is a more accurate question, despite an annoying amount of verbosity. But answers are still given relatively. "Cloudy" could be an accurate answer, for now. But it will be "Sunny" this afternoon.

Some people will prefer a one word answer to "What's the weather?". Others, will want an hourly breakdown of the day displayed on their screen. Others, might prefer a week. It's hard to give an ideal response for every situation.

Ironically, if I say "Hey Siri, weather" I usually get what I need.

Or with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside".

One of my meteorologist friends always answers "What's the weather?" with, "The state of the atmosphere."

“What's the time?” “What's up?”

The possibilities are endless.

> What if you asked Google "what's the weather?" and ... with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside".

Now that you mention it, I find it strange that voice assistants don't give natural responses when they encounter an error. It would make them seem more real, and it would be less frustrating.

When you ask a human what the weather is and they tell you to look outside, you don't try to rephrase the question in a way that will make them give you the right answer, you just realize this is not the way to get an answer and you look for another way.

Maybe this isn't the best way for it to work in this case, since there is a different thing you can ask to get the response you want, but maybe this would make interactions better if, say, the phone can't detect your location. "Where did you want the weather for? I think I'm lost."

Of course, the other problem is that if it gives the same response every time it'll get grating. The hundredth time you hear "Look outside," it has probably lost its charm. I wonder how possible it would be to generate responses that take into account all previous conversations, so that this doesn't happen.

Put another way, joking or snarky responses from a human aren't just jokes, they're a form of social communication. If voice assistants used those forms without intending to communicate the same thing, that would just be frustrating in a different way.

I've actually had this with Siri. I've asked about the wind and Siri gave me the definition of wind.

Other times it will tell me the wind speed.

Other times, for the same query, it will tell me the wind speed AND direction, which is what I want.

But it's always random what I get: wind speed, wind direction, a combination of both, or (occasionally) the definition of wind.

they spend a lot of time with these requests i think. “sing me a song”, “are you insane” etc

For your neighborhood or was this a more structural problem and did your collegeas find more locations with similar issues?

IIRC it had something to do with the parent hierarchy of my neighborhood. It was parented by both a postal code and a city, or something. I'm probably making that up, but I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it is to create and maintain abstractions for every possible geographic situation.

I wasn't aware of any other occurrences.

Not only a zip code can span cities, a single city/zip can span multiple tax authorities e.g. parts of Redmond, WA zip code 98052 are under Regional Transit Authority and others are not.

I think that pretty much any assumption we're making about strict hierarchy are bound to be broken at some point.

I worked with zip codes on a project. Zip codes are a nightmare. They cross everything. There are zip codes which cross state-lines. Zip codes which are not a single contiguous area of land. So many issues.

I feel your pain. It turns out there are even a group of ZIP codes that apply only to specific businesses, buildings, or even people (if you're important enough).

That's because zip codes aren't defined by an area, but by postal routes.

Zip codes don’t denote geographic regions; they denote nodes in the postal routing network.

That’s a fun experience to debug a problem, I bet if that problem goes thru customer service, it probably will not unfold and let alone a fix.

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