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Google also decided at one point that all street names in a Finnish city should be in Swedish.

Yes, Finland is a bilingual country and some southern cities have official names in Swedish, but this town was a full 300km from the southern border and zero of the street names had official Swedish alternatives. Google just decided to autotranslate all the street names with no fallback.

People complained, Google didn't care. At one point after a few weeks it just magically reverted back.

Meanwhile as an American living in Finland, I just wish I could have my directions in English, use Metric system, but have the names of streets and the like use the Finnish pronunciation. Instead it absolutely butchers the pronunciation almost beyond comprehension and gives me the streets in both Finnish and Swedish as further punishment.

I'd also like that as a Finnish person, since I keep my phone in English, although I imagine I have a slightly easier time parsing them from "English" than you do.

You can change the language of Google Maps to Finnish, and still keep the phone on English. At least in the latest versions of Android. This makes it pronounce the street names properly

At least on Apple devices I found out that the Irish Siri version pronounces Finnish street names the least badly =)

Yeah, Google absolutely butchering street names in non-English languages is a common theme. I no longer use the audio directions, they're that useless.

Street names in Denmark are often "so-and-so way" or "such-and-such street". Way is vej. Street is gade, pronounced a bit like 'girl'.

A typical Danish name might be Ny Munkegade -- new monk's street. Google maps directions produce "noy mun keg ade", which is utterly incomprehensible.

Eh, you get used to it. Certainly the lessor evil compared to living with Danish voice assistants/text to speech...

When I was first learning German, I set my Google account (and phone) to it, despite being in the U.S.

Google Maps' decision as to which street names to translate to German when using voice directions seemed completely arbitrary. Numbered streets I could kinda understand (e.g. First Street was called out as "Erste Straße"), but others were perplexing: it insisted on calling Rainbow Blvd. "Regenboden Boulevard" despite using (non-translated, but German-accented) English for every other nearby street.

If I was a German-only speaker, looking at street signs, I would have been lost.

(This was also an educational experience re: dark patterns. I eventually had to switch back to English, because I repeatedly almost got tricked into clicking "yes" instead of "not now" on things I didn't ever want to enable. Despite my having repeatedly opted out in English, Google almost got me to "consent" in German because my language skills there weren't as good.)

Another source of constant hilarity is when the voice guidance tries to pronounce the names of ring roads in Helsinki metropolitan area: Kehä I / Ring I. They're numbered using roman numerals (I through III) but Maps has no such knowledge of this so it just ends up rattling off the route number and "Kehä / Ring" with the ring road numerals as if they were just a literal letter I.

Sometimes the lane guidance also likes to pick up on the destinations from the overhead signs, trying to pronounce the Finnish and Swedish names with less than stellar results.

Ha! Try living in Santa Catarina, Brasil

Not only is the portuguese pronounciation pretty bad most of the time (in their defense streets can have very annoying names over here), they don't use location to expand acronyms, so the state/province-managed highways ("SC-401" etc) get read aloud as "South Carolina 401". Couldn't be more wrong.

I'm not sure how this happens. Most of the time, only the English (even though I use the UK variant) voice does this incorrect substitution, but in some occasions the portuguese voice can try saying the english words "south carolina" with portuguese pronounciation, which is hilarious in a disappointing way.

(Maybe the pt-BR voice model knows to pronounce SC as humans do, just the letters, but the acronym expansion happens in text, before voice is involved, in some code paths? No idea, just guessing)

A few weeks sounds like the TTL of an easy, but low priority, task on some team's Kanban board.

> People complained, Google didn't care. At one point after a few weeks it just magically reverted back.

So Google did care?

At this scale, change takes time to unfold due to bureaucracy and technical reasons.

Most likely some government folks got upset enough for Google to care.

"Have correct street names in a mid-size Finnish town" wasn't in anyone's KPIs, so they didn't bother with it for way too long.

I've had this, twice, in different addresses. Map edits seem to do nothing for wrong road names or roads not suitable for traffic. Causes havoc for deliveries.

Other mapping source datas (TomTom, HERE) all fix mapping issues, even if takes time to get it approved. For Google, it's a blackhole, the only way to get it properly fixed was to reach out to a contact at Google to raise it internally.

My wife and I noticed our Jets pizza kept getting delivered to the building behind ours.

The first couple of times it happened we were walking into the lobbies of neighboring buildings scouring for our delicious 8-corner.

Finally we figured out the mapping API they were using was wrong and asked Google to correct it.

I am now happy to report our 8-corners get delivered to the correct building lobby.

Google maps loves to confuse my house, "#X Y Ave", with a different house several miles away, "#X Y Ave South". It doesn't matter whether you enter the address correctly; Google will sometimes "correct" you over to the other one. My own sister ended up at the wrong house once, after following her phone's directions!

USPS knows what they are doing, but packages delivered by other services sometimes just don't show up. Delivery drivers are constantly confused; we have made a habit of putting long instructions in the order notes about the actual location. Sometimes this even works.

Speaking of USPS knowing what they're doing, their address normalization replaces our city name with the broader "Minneapolis," but multiple delivery services use that normalization without flowing the zip code through to directions lookup (whether a tech issue or driver retyping omission), which results in drivers calling us from another suburb 15 minutes away as the pizza goes cold.

Around the same topic, in two successive apartments I've been living in the app-based "disruptive" logistics services are unusable, apparently due to the way they are using GMaps. The legacy parcel delivery and mail companies have no issues finding our apartments, using the addresses, but at least both Uber and Wolt seem to always attempt pickup and delivery at the neighbouring lots.

My best guess so far is that they request driving directions using GPS coordinates for my address, which leads to GMaps reserve-mapping it to the neighbouring street, which is closer to the building but the drivers will face a fence. Food drivers usually leave the packages to a neighbour, Uber drivers make angry phone calls and claim that I'm not at the pickup point. Customer service keeps blaming me for failing to enter my address and location properly, so my improvement suggestions go nowhere past the first tier support.

I have to favour services with a proper localisation, usually the ones not developed around a mobile app.

For me, the most egregious behavior comes from those “disruptive” services trying to be “helpful” by using the address form as search instead of taking the address as is.

All of the possible choices invariably lead drivers to the wrong location.

No one at Uber read anyting like “myths programmers believe about addresses” it seems.

Also, my country (Portugal) has a postal code that almost uniquely identifies my house, and both Google Maps and Waze ignore it in favor of hand-wavy parsing of the rest of the address.

> Slightly off topic, but I get a lot of frustration from Google Maps. Waze works well for me, while GMaps don't. So seeing those two merge more is bad news for me.

I have the same, but my friend from the UK has the opposite. Does it depend on the country ? Where I live, when I use Google maps, it sends me into fields on roads that are gone already for ages while Waze works perfectly... Google maps sends me to places I cannot get out of or continue (so narrow that I cannot continue or turn and have to drive backwards to get out) etc.

>Does it depend on the country ?

It might be, but in my opinion, most of these problems can be solved with two minute call with a real person who has elevated access to Google Maps edits. This would save people months of frustration.

I never had any problems with other big tech support. Only Google

I arrived in Valletta taking the high speed ferry from Gozo.

According to Google Maps my hotel was a 20 minute meandering walk through the blistering heat.

Thankfully, I've been in the very hotel already and new this to be garbage information.

Actually you just walk up some steps and three minutes later you arrive at the hotel.

When I told that to the proprietor he just groaned and told me that it took him years of effort to get Google to correct the street route they had marked to his hotel.

Let's just say this made quite a dent in my confidence in all things Google.

> but I even add a link to Google Street view which has a literal street sign with correct name and coordinates

Do the report from the app on a phone while you're at the location and take a picture of the sign yourself. I've had more success this way. I think it logs that you're actually looking the place while reporting and finds it more trustworthy.

You need to contact your city management. Their mapping departments that publish the official maps have the contacts to Google and other mapping companies. Possibly, the error actually originates from their dataset!

It doesn't originate from their dataset. I specifically linked city management's URL with correct street name in my "proof".

Weird. In any case, you have to contact them and have them fix it.

Yeah, I used to live in the Colorado mountains. There were two ways to my house. A slow 10-mile long dirt road or a faster 12 mile long highway followed by a 2 mile back-track on a very serious off road trail that I would only take my most-built-up Jeep on. Google maps kept telling people to go the off-road way where of course there's also no cell signal. I had to start telling people to explicitly use MapQuest (yes, MapQuest) to get to my house because Google and the others never figured out the way that an actual car could get to my house.

I'm having a similar issue but even deeper. It's not that Google doesn't accept my edits, it's that Google Maps doesn't even seem to support the format that my address is in. My house number is 1/2 and the neighbor is 1/1. No matter how many times and different ways I've tried to teach Google this, the search for 1/2 keeps showing the pin of 1/1 - which Google just shows as 1.

Can't you just add a note about this in your order details? I usually do that when I know the data on one of the services that delivery people use is wrong.

Add your address (or edit your street location) in Google maps. They've picked up most of my edits relatively quick.

Same for me, bur the parent poster said they tried that 10 times already.

Maybe ask more people to do it!

I did that from 3 different accounts. I've tried doing that on a phones with GPS on so the overlord might pick up that I am a local. But nothing works, I think I am 'shadow-banned' from edits now, because it says my edits are accepted but they are never updated on Maps.

Google map is not a mirror of openstreetmap but a lot of changes from openstreetmap are reported to maps. If streetmaps is already up-to-date with your street number, try to trigger a change (move a street number 1 meter, ..)

I've tried changing shape of the street to match satellite view. But only the shape change was accepted, not street name change.

Regarding OSM data, I think Google does not use any of OSM data, otherwise they would have to credit it and I don't see it credited. I don't think that OSM has any impact here.

> try to trigger a change (move a street number 1 meter, ..)

Please don’t do a small insignificant change in OSM just because it might trigger something somewhere else. Make changes to improve the map data in OSM!

That sucks. My street name was incorrect and it took me only a couple days to get Google Maps to fix it.