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Comment by swaranga | Hacker News Reader

I moved to USA from India and after the interstates, this is one of the top things I am jealous of since we don’t have a sane addressing system in India.

Only if you are from such a place you will have an idea how frustrating it is to explain to a delivery person how to reach your apartment. “Bro, come around behind the mall, proceed to the dead-end and then left and then to the right after the temple”. This is not even some small town in a remote place. This is Bangalore, where I lived for years near corporate offices. Sigh.

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Does something like Google Plus Code (https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/) help in this case? This sounds exactly like the use case they wanted to support (and that was supported by other systems prior to GPC), so I am curious if it, in fact, makes any difference on the ground.

Interesting, apart from the problem that like any Google feature/product it will likely be abandoned, and then shut down in a few years screwing over anyone that actually depended on it :smh:

Plus Codes (or Open Location Codes) are simply mappings from latitude/longitude to an alphanumeric string [1], and there are open-source implementations in many languages [2], which means the effect of the project being abandoned would be limited.

[1] https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/doc...

[2] https://github.com/google/open-location-code

Indian food delivery and ride-hailing companies like Zomato and Ola don’t appear to support it yet (and training their delivery folk), sadly. I wish they would though — it would make life much easier. Most delivery people I’ve spoken to are unaware of the feature.

Also Google Maps in India has quite a bit of variance from “ground truth” so the phenomenon OP describes (of delivery folk calling you up every. single. time) is very real.

It wouldn’t work in India in most cases. Most delivery person uses a motorbike for deliveries which I believe is not equipped with a goa device that they can refer to at all times during driving. Even if they have a smartphone and I send them a google maps link, they end up calling me several times throughout the delivery.

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