Street address errors in Google Maps | Hacker News Reader

Street address errors in Google Maps

randomascii.wordpress.com

147 pointsbrucedawson160 comments

In the logistics industry the commonly held wisdom is that there really isn't any accepted system for "how street addresses work". Different countries have completely different systems, and even within a country there are often many different conventions.

The thing that really matters in delivery is whether the address on the consignment has enough information for an operator to complete the next leg. By the time an item makes it to the region where the delivery address is situated, the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.

Even if the city in the article has a well defined system, it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system. This is the problem that geocoding schemes (what3words, etc) are meant to solve, creating a single system that applies globally. But like many "rational" systems that attempt to replace entrenched practices, they struggle to gain traction.

Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”

https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...

I skimmed and I think that's missing

That a building|property will have only one address.

Sometimes (eg: rural Australia) property addresses are updated from an older numbered lot based system (that goes astray when properties are subdivided and infill houses appear) to a system that numbers houses by driveway distance from last major intersection.

For five or ten years a house can be recieving mail or be on the records with both the old and the new address.

I think this idea that a building/property can have more than one address can happen in the United States too. The way I see it, it is because a ZIP code can be associated with a list of cities that are categorized as “recommended city name”, “other city names recognized for addresses in this zip code” and “city names to avoid”. [1]

So as an example, if you use the UPSP Cities by ZIP Code to research 77005 and you would see that they recommend using the city name of “Houston” for mail, but they would also recognize “West University Place”. There’s also a city called “Southside Place” which should be avoided when it comes to sending mail. But then that kind of makes me think that if a house is within the limits of one or these small cities, then it could in theory have the same street name but have two different city values in different databases.

Then on the other hand there’s a somewhat related problem where a small town or village (e.g. Somers, WI and Scotland, CT) can have multiple ZIP codes and that ends up causing a lot of headaches for the residents of the town since they all might live nearby but then each section of the town might end up associated with some other larger city it’s closest to.

[1]: https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?citybyzipcode

I know of a house near Chicago that has two addresses with different street names. It's on the corner of an intersection and the "mailing address" is different than the "front door" address.

Not that there's a mailbox on the mailing address street. (There's only a small side profile of a house/yard on the mailing address street side). There doesn't seem to be a good reason for the mailing address.

> The way I see it, it is because a ZIP code can be associated with a list of cities that are categorized as “recommended city name”, “other city names recognized for addresses in this zip code” and “city names to avoid”. [1]

This one affects me personally and it bugs me programmers think that they know better than I do about my address when I try and enter the city name and zip code, then they "correct" the city name based on the zip code and make it read only.

a) what was the point of me entering the city if you were going to fill it in anyway ?

b) this has happened in the last two cities I've lived and is dirt common around a major metro area in the United States. Stop autocorrecting user entered data, let them be wrong!

Also: I live on sevenmile hill Rd. Google thinks it's 7 mile hill Rd, and others sometimes call it seven mile hill rd

You can pick from multiple city names on tons of addresses. But that's a lot less exciting than having multiple completely separate numbers or streets for the same building.

I suppose it is, but to me it came as a bit of a surprise that if I want to send mail to someone in a certain area, I can essentially toss a coin when trying to figure out which city name to use as long as I don’t use certain ones that are discouraged names. I believe my ZIP code has two city names I could use, but I would never use the non-main one because in my mind, that other city is miles away.

That struck me, although I already knew that a ZIP code could span multiple cities and sometimes even states. I just thought there would be no confusion about which city name to use.

I’m almost positive you can omit city name completely and just include a street address and zip code.

This happens in metro areas quite frequently. I used to live in a suburb of Atlanta that had a valid address in "Atlanta, GA" and "Suburb, GA" - which was a common annoyance when using delivery apps or service area locating systems as which address was considered "valid" often changed depending on the provider of their mapping API.

There’s also the question of unit numbers and whatnot. In some addressing lookup systems in the US my address is 525 Some Road Unit G; but I have encountered systems that treat it as 525G Some Road.

The unit is usually formatted as either `{building number}-{unit number} {street name}` or `{building number} {street name}, Unit {unit number}`. But both resolve to the same thing.

What I like is that address box 2 (sometimes unlabelled, lives under the address box) exists specifically for unit numbers. So, I'll put in my street address in two lines:

  Street Address  :792 Charleston Avenue
  Street Address 2:555

At which point, almost invariably, it'll say "Do you want to accept the Post Office's recommended address?"

  Street Address  :792 Charleston Avenue 555
  Street Address 2:

Why provide the second address box if even in the one case where it's relevant and appropriate to use it, you're going to just stick the unit number in the first line anyway? It's so silly!

Then you have vanity addresses, when I worked for a utility. Where people might put their address as, say, Beverly Hills 90212.

It also happens in places where a house/building spans two streets, and gets an address on both. Same reason some buildings get multiple numbers on the same street (happens a lot if they want to keep the option to later split entrances and give them numbers for instance)

Or they were multiple adjacent spaces in, say, a strip mall that later merged into one larger business.

I used to be a EMS call taker/dispatch (911) in Ontario, Canada. Addresses could be such a pain, especially in the the more rural areas. There were multiple townships around some bigger cities. They had different naming schemes and suffered from a similar problem that you mentioned. Many of the addresses also had old addresses. Our system would luckily often have both versions of the address stored, but not always. Additionally a lot of our roads have both numbers to address them by, such as "Regional Road 12", but then they'd also have an actual name. Almost every went by the actual name, however in the rural areas sometimes they had old real names, but it never was "official" so it isn't even listed.

Overall addresses are such a mess, and they are a mess even for governmental agencies like this one.

In the UK, our national mapping service has built a tool for hosting vernacular place names to help first responders.

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/news/new-national-vernacula...

That's neat, thanks for sharing! We had the ability to accept a what3word location however it was a really convoluted process to actually attempt to use it. Unfortunately I never personally had anyone use it to give a location, even though it probably would have helped in many cases.

Had some calls where people would be hurt in a forest on a trail system and it was pretty common for people to not even know the name of the trail they are on nor which street they entered it from. Sometimes the GPS location the phone provided to EMS would help, but it also wasn't always 100% reliable, especially if they were in a forest. So being able to have them look at a map on their phone, pin where they are, and give a what3word location would have been immensely helpful.

The kind of system you linked to would also have been quite helpful for the other problems I mentioned.

I don’t know how they came to be, but in rural America I have seen houses which have signs very explicitly saying that two or more addresses are all this one house, so please deliver anything addressed to any of them.

The building in that example does have only one address. The old address is not valid any more. People just accept the erroneous use of the old address for the sake of expediency.

It has at least two official addresses each with a [time frame] of official validity.

When merging records the old address, no longer valid with the local land management agency, still appears on old notices and on current state and or federal records (as land naming agencies are layered in some locales with changes taking time to perculate).

The old address is "the correct address" in the context of birth records, old newspaper articles, last years tax records, etc.

You're technically pedantically correct .. but in a manner that's moot when faced with the realities of day to day day reconciliation of meaning of text on an envelope or document.

Besides that, in Buenos Aires, for instance, every access to the street has its own address. A building with 2 entrances (front door and garage) has 2 addresses, etc.

Where I currently live, my street has no name, my house has no number. If a package is delivered by mail, my phone number needs to be put on the package, and the local delivery operator calls me to either pick it up, or I send my location through telegram and they deliver it to my house.

It’s almost entirely impossible to order through Amazon et al using this type of system, it’s just not supported at all.

The same goes for my country or origin (in EU), they require my address in order to be able to send important mail. It’s just not possible because of the computer systems not accepting anything without a zipcode, address and house number.

What's preventing some local authority from just naming your street?

And what's preventing you and your neighbors from having a meeting, agreeing on a numbering convention, and putting street numbers on your house? I guess it would be a bit silly/meaningless if you don't have your street name.

Because most of my neighbors are expats and only renting and don’t actually own the property they live in.

Local authority doesn’t care, because it’s a very western problem. Locals rarely have problems with it, and use “go left the second street after the big tree near the market, and then it’s the third house on the right”.

Local people generally don’t use navigation apps like Google Maps, they don’t know how to use it.

Sounds like you have something a little like Carmel, California:

https://ci.carmel.ca.us/post/addresses

A unique characteristic of Carmel-by-the-Sea is that there are no street addresses. Properties are identified, for example, as being on the "west side of San Antonio Street, 3 houses south of 12th Avenue". In addition to this, many owners give their homes a name. The name you choose does not have to be approved or registered with the City.

How do you specify your location? GPS coordinates?

I imagine with something like:

Person name, Local-area name, Region Name, Country name, Phone number

This gets it to the nearest handler to the local area, who then needs to know where the person lives or call them.

This is correct.

<my name>, <my phone>, Siem Reap, Cambodia works.

It’s just not accepted. So I’ll just fill in random numbers at zip code and street names and the delivery companies over here generally know how to deal with it.

Telegram location sharing, he said.

They check my phone number on telegram. If it exists, they usually reach out on telegram, and ask whether I want to pick it up or prefer delivery.

If I want delivery, I share my location over telegram and a bit later someone comes on his motorbike to deliver the package.

> It’s almost entirely impossible to order through Amazon et al

The "almost" is interesting - how do you do it in reality?

I provide an address that looks technically correct, ensure it’s delivered with DHL, and then override DHL to pick up at one of their locations.

Also, there are special delivery companies like CamboQuick that take the whole process out of your hands and use (slow) ships freight to ship stuff from Amazon et al to Cambodia. You’ll have to wait 4-6 weeks, but they handle the custom clearance and everything and deliver it to your house for a $2 fee.

Why don’t you name your road and assign a house number? Either just make it up, or to make it more official contact your local government and propose a name and numbering scheme for it.

Have you tried adding delivery instructions? But I guess you couldn't complete an Amazon order without an address.

I remember a time before Ireland set up postcodes (zip codes) for the whole country. If postcode was mandatory field in an e-commerce address form, you couldn't mail stuff from the UK unless it was in Dublin. Dublin had postcodes.

I managed to find one site that would accept 'null' so the form would submit.

Ireland's postcode system now is a thing called Eircode, which each eircode maps to your address exactly

I used to just do "n/a", "na", "none", or "0000", whatever would make it accept.

In US sites i usually input 90210 because Beverly Hills lol

> From where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked, Managua, Nicaragua

James C. Scott would be proud.

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system

That's not the original ethos of Google: organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. I don't know about now but twenty years ago Google almost certainly thought it worthwhile to encode the rules of every regional system. Add that to Larry and Sergey's "healthy disregard for the impossible" I'm willing to bet that twenty years ago Google had almost certainly made it feasible to do just that: encode the rules of every regional system.

20 years ago I think the coverage area of Google Maps was still strictly limited to the US + UK. Like, the rest of the world map was empty.

But I worked on Google's geocoding (mapping names to locations) and reverse geocoding (mapping locations to names) systems 15 years ago, and encoding every local ruleset was absolutely not how it worked. Or even encoding any of them.

And what's described in the post are exactly the kinds of problems you'd have back then as well.

Some of these were upstream data quality issues, some were due to deep infrastructure problems that could not have been addressed without a complete rewrite, and others just basic recall/precision tradeoffs around the value of returning a result that doesn't match the query exactly.

And it didn’t last long. Simplified Chinese has creeped into Google Map Hong Kong for years.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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..

You're making the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Making sure buildings are near the street listed, in the right range of numbers, is a system that works in most regions and should be encoded and used for checking data.

I wouldn't automatically assume that they don't have such checks. Checking an entry for reasonableness is a good idea, but it needs to be overrideable. Sometimes you'll need an entry that isn't actually reasonable by whatever definitions you use. And then you'll tend to have your workers get used to the override and not actually think about whether it might have a point.

So who's responsible for then figuring out what nested regions, and nested regions of nested regions, and nested regions of nested regions of nested regions, that then does and doesn't apply to?

You don't need that.

If you want the map to reflect reality, yes, you do.

I'm going to keep tapping the "perfect as enemy of the good" sign.

A complete lack of auto checking is much worse than having the regions be slightly wrong.

For a practical example here, check out Mumbai, India in Google Maps and look at addresses of various businesses there, most of which amount to "Building Soandso on Road X near Landmark Suchandsuch in neighborhood Y" (ans often written in a non-standardized way, on top of that). To compensate, delivery apps there have you visually put a pin on a map as a standard part of checkout flows.

> it’s probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system

Does it have to encode them all? Why not start out with one then at least Google Maps is a little better for some.

Besides that, how many systems could there be? There are only something like 10,000 cities on the planet. That sounds like the kind of task Google is built to handle.

Wait what?

I live in a small country of ~2mio pop, and we have approximately 6000 settlements with streets and street addresses and many different standards of numberings, depending on many reason, mostly historic.

Technically yes, a few thousand systems could be programmed into some google processing engine, but you'd have to manually classify every road to set the correct system, and even there, you'd never know what is a legit numbering scheme or what is an error.

For example, Cucumber street 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 on one side of the street and Cucumber street 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 on the other is a valid numbering scheme. If #3 splits his front yard and builds another house, you'd get "3a" on that side. If #6 buys #8, demolishes one or both buildings and builds a bigger one, that could become either a "6" or an "8", and the other would be missing. Then #7 is demolished and an apartment building is built there with 4 entrances to 4 separate building sections, so those would be numbered 7a, 7b, 7c and 7d, even though they're in the same building. #5, #7 and #9 are also a part of the same building (three entrances), but the building is older, the street was renamed and renumbered some time after, and each of the entrances got its own number. Then you come to #10, which is also a building with 4 entrances, but #10 goes towards Cucumber street, and the other three are facing the Lettuce street and are thus Lettuce street 6, 6a and 6b. Notice starting with the "6" here and "7a" above, well, that's because #6 lettuce street existed before the building was expanded, it kept the #6 number, but since there used to be a shed on Cucumber street #7, the new building starts with 7a.

Good luck writing a general model for that.

Your "Cucumber street" is exactly like Germany works, as far as I can tell, including the even/odd split, and the a/b/c/d... when inserting new houses, or separate building sections. (I've seen as far as "h" in one extreme case, but I think after "d" becomes pretty uncommon.)

Was that intentional, or just neat coincidence?

The problem isn’t addresses being a few (tens of) meters off.

> Good luck writing a general model for that.

Sounds like you described the general model.

Anyway, if your little country is difficult for Google, they should probably skip it for now. Do New York first. Then L.A. Then Toronto. It doesn’t have to cover everything, just make things better for a meaningful number of people.

But it's not a general model.

Are house humbers 6 and 7 next to each other? 6 and 8? What number would come next if the building numbers go 2, 4, 6, 8, ? If there's is a "7b", is there a 7 too? 7a?

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.

This is literally true when talking about the entire planet, but this is Vancouver.

There are many geocoding systems that do just fine with the considerable range of addressing schemes in the developed world.

Something very weird is going on here, like Google finding a cheaper method for geocoding that is probabilistic and yields a level of errors they are ok with.

> and even within a country there are often many different conventions.

You know who knows this? The tax authority.

> the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.

Large freight does not work this way. I worked on top of a ski resort for a while. We had a mapped address right where the ski left let out instead of the base of the hill. In the summer you could drive up to it on an ATV easily and a pickup truck if it hadn't recently rained. Somehow a semi truck driver for a freight company got this address and mapped a route to it. We were quite surprised to see the 53' box truck driving up the side of the ski hill.

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.

The information is encoded elsewhere and it's a bummer there is no incentive to make it as open and widely available as is possible. Although if delivery can rely only on partial information to "complete the next leg" then why can't address lookup do precisely the same thing?

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system

I disagree, it's a requirement of being global. If you can't be global, don't. Meanwhile they have hundreds of thousands of engineers in their employ around the world, they have the scale to be correct.

I know this isn't what you said, but the idea that a small scrappy team of developers in one corner of the world can develop a system that works at all for the entire planet while dealing with the real world should be possible is just nonsensical. There's no reason Google can't be correct other than the fact it's unsexy to management that solving the problem involves hiring people who speak nearly every language on the planet and can connect and comply with enough governments around the world to get things right. Somehow that's not less surprising than sending cars everywhere to take photos of everyone's front doors without their consent.

> even within a country there are often many different conventions

Indeed... sometimes USPS even makes up their own "vanity city" names that don't exist. Or mailing addresses might use a different city name than where the house is physically located because of where the post office is physically located.

Google Maps may not be able to understand every regional system but it _does_ understand the system in Vancouver. It then, apparently, makes it too easy for exceptions to this system to get encoded in their database and makes it too hard to fix those errors when they are noticed.

I worked on a global consumer mapping app once. Among that team, the idea that address schemes were too inconsistent to be useful was also conventional wisdom.

And yet, as I mention in the blog post, Google Maps actually does understand how Vancouver's addresses work. It can find the location where a non-existent address would be if it existed. But for addresses like 138 W 6th Ave it chooses not to, instead trusting... well, I don't know what it's trusting. But whatever it is trusting is wrong, and is resistant to being corrected through the feedback tool.

If the author can use the Google Maps feedback tool to get the errors fixed, I'm pretty sure somewhere on the internet someone with malice can also use the same feedback tool to place the address at the wrong location. The only safeguard is probably a low-paid contractor in India reviewing these manual suggestions.

One year ago the Elizabeth line disappeared from the maps in London. There are many Reddit posts about this such as https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1be01n3/... and https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/1b0xxb0/.... I asked a friend who worked at Google and they said that it was because some poor workers in India accidentally hid it while fixing something else.

Someone did this a couple of years ago for a major thoroughfare near where I lived. They marked it as one way for a key stretch, and traffic ended up being re-routed down much smaller roads to avoid it. It caused all sorts of chaos, both due to the increased traffic on roads not made for it, and in the long queues that formed where the traffic then rejoined the thoroughfare.

It took google at least the best part of a month to fix it (at least, it was around a month from when I submitted the correction, no idea if others beat me to it)

Google does have a nearly impossible task making Maps work around the world, and I think it does an admirable job. One just has to have a bit of local knowledge to work around the quirks. For example, the walking directions Maps gives for Singapore are usually ridiculous. They're almost always twice the distance they need to be, since it's very common to cut through the open lower floor (void deck) of apartment buildings (HDB blocks) to get anywhere on foot here. I typically just use the walking directions to get a bearing, point the compass pointer toward the destination, and start walking in as nearly a straight line as I can, ignoring the circuitous path Maps suggests.

Driving directions on the expressways here are also spotty. If I wait for Maps to tell me to exit the expressway, I'm already at or past the exit. I basically have to already kind of know where I'm going to make use of driving directions (you know, like we used to do with paper maps). Never mind that there are actual bugs in the directions: at one spot on the Ayer Rajah Expressway (AYE), if I need to exit onto the MCE, it tells me to exit onto the AYE, which is incorrect).

Still, I guess it's better than nothing.

And another one I just thought of: If I ask for driving directions to a mall or office building (here in Singapore, anyway), it nearly always sends me to the taxi drop-off, not the entrance to the carpark. I have to drop a pin on the carpark entrance (which presumes that I know where it is) to get sane directions. Otherwise, I end up on the wrong side of the building in gridlocked traffic trying to find the carpark.

That is a problem they haven't tried to solve. Driving directions could be for tax/ride-share or a person in their own car. If Google Maps doesn't even ask you which it is then it can't possibly reliably give you correct directions. I'd love to see that fixed.

Google Maps can be downright dangerous in its lack of knowledge, and it'll make routing decisions that other GPS devices don't make (despite similarly working around the world). For example, it cannot comprehend the idea of country lanes in the UK, where e.g. TomTom can. Country lanes are narrow, twisty, and single file with passing places. But they're "national speed limit", or 60mph. You will never, ever go down one of these at 60mph. In most cases it's flat out impossible. Google Maps thinks you can go that fast.

If enough people using google maps have been down it in the right time frame it'll know the road is slow and account for it in time calculations, and generally not send you down it. The fact that no one using google maps has ever managed to go down that lane at 60mph never seems to enter into its consideration.

I've never had TomTom send me down a country lane unless it's literally the only way to get to where I'm going.

Google Maps' database contains nonsensically placed addresses of non-existent buildings. Worse, however, is that it also contains entries for real buildings that are mapped blocks or kilometers away from their actual location, leading to real-life consequences.

After two weeks of failing to fix the most significant error that I found I decided to blog about the issue in hopes of getting the attention of the Google Maps team, and also to share what I found.

Google maps also includes towns in rural areas that don't exist.

There are 4 listed within 20 miles of my house that haven't existed for well over 100 years. They're not incorporated anymore, and they don't exist on any other maps, just Google.

It's weird.

Could be copyright traps to detect unauthorized copying of the map:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement

So the towns that show up did exist at one point in the 1800's and early 1900's for a couple. They were towns in the past, but aren't anymore. So I'm not sure they're paper towns. As I understand it, those never existed at all.

Map Men have a fun take on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI

(Their whole series is brilliant too!)

Four of them in basically the same spot?

If they're all copied, then they've got a pretty good case that they'd been copied, and it couldn't have been an accident.

If you can copy one fake data point by accident, you can copy four.

On the other hand, having such an exact match is clearly not a coincidence even if there's only one.

So either way I don't see the value in having four.

Good one. These are the real easter eggs

Various maps ingest almost random data - around where I am the street maps (plots) are about 50 feet diagonally off.

It’s entirely visible if you overlay satellite with the map, but it’ll probably never be fixed.

I've noticed that Google maps now tries sometimes to incorporate building entrances into walking directions. I wonder if misplaced building entrances may be part of the explanation.

It drives me crazy that Google Maps sometimes asks me where the entrance to a building is but it never seems to be clear about what it is asking. Where a pedestrian would enter? Where a car would enter?

Driving directions are a wonderful thing but they need to account for whether you are arriving in a ride-share vehicle (please drop me at the front entrance) or in a car you need to park (the front entrance may be worthless) - lots of work yet to be done.

I have the same dilemma, but it has even more factors to consider such as different staff entrances and parking lots.

For example, at my work I enter on a different side of the building with my vehicle as a staff. When on foot there is also a different staff entrance than the public entrance. I actually often don't put in my work for navigating, I instead put in a manually saved set of coordinates of where the parking lot entrance is. Because it can make a difference on which way it suggests for navigation.

Really cool and thorough work! Thanks for sharing!

My own first intuition is that it's not actually a data problem at all, and that "Google Maps has no concept of.." might simply reflect the ongoing, enshittening, transition from structured "concepts" to ML "vibes" for products like Google's.

It's not that the underlying maps data store has the addresses wrong, but there's a layer between the input field and the result generator that's statistically deciding you mean something besides what you explicitly enterred and is giving you a route to a silently "corrected" address.

We've seen that happening more and more in Search for years, silently ignoring keywords and directives without a "did you mean" callout, and it would seem natural for some product owner to be pushing an equivalent initiative in Maps. Aggregate metrics move the right way, so the company is happy, but of course the actual product experience sees a fractal failure pattern that nobody can quite address but makes results less and less reliable.

I'd love to be wrong, though, as I think this would be a terrible advent for something that can be life-critical like a popular mapping tool.

While Google is no stranger to enshittification, I think Maps (and Contacts) are two services where it's just damn hard.

In particular it was developed in the western world from a startup, so the first approach probably was minimal and adapted to local streets, without even covering the edge cases.

Going from that to mapping every single address in the world is a huge leap and the underlying data system must be an incredible mess, also creating regressions on what used to be reliable.

I don't know if they got to it, but a few years ago you couldn't have vertical stacking (e.g. floors), shops with the same address needed workarounds to have a different entry.

Then some places have multiple addresses. The article talks about street numbers making sense, but in most places in the world they don't, disappear at random points, some countries don't have street names. We could talk about it years.

"Is the parcel in the geographical bounds of the city name entered?"

The "city name" on an address isn't really a "city". SFO's address is "San Francisco, CA", but is not within SF city limits.

Queens NY addresses have "cities" that are just neighborhoods.

Applying any kind of logic to addresses will just be a minefield.

The Pentagon's address even has the wrong state. The address is Washington, DC, but it's in Arlington, VA.

i heard that is original secret underground metro system entrance location !

In much of unincorporated america, the most valid form of an address just uses the nearest city regardless of boundaries. Almost nowhere actually guarantees that every bit of land is even in a city limits. At the margins, addresses are unstructured free form text that is correct if it can be interpreted by a human with local knowledge.

There’s also no particular reason to expect that an address corresponds to exactly one parcel or that any given parcel has an address at all or that any given parcel has at most one address.

Yeah, this is bizarre. I don't know how it works in Canada but in the US the city/zip of the mailing address is just the location of the post office that delivers mail. It has nothing to do with the municipal the address is actually in.

hundreds of people in my city-county really think they live in a city in the next county over just because of the "city" label on their zip code

I will give credit to the Google Maps team—they handle Queens NYC street address correctly.

Apple Maps drives me nuts—it will only return search results if you include the hyphen in the four digit street address ie: "36-08 33rd St" vs "3608 33rd St". Google will hit on either query.

The hyphen is a part of the "official" address. However, USPS has declared it unnecessary, there's no advantage to using it unless you're navigating by analog map, and it's a PITA to type on a mobile keyboard.

So if anyone on Apple Maps team is here: please fix this. I filled a apple.com/feedback ticket on this years ago.

For anyone interested in the peculiar history of Queens addresses—they convey a cross street and the number of the house ascending going northward.

For example: 36-08 33rd St means that the house is on 33rd St, between 35th and 36th ave, and is house #08 on the block.

https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm https://www.nydailynews.com/2011/08/21/balderdash-queens-res...

That said, Apple Maps is far superior to Google Maps for transit directions, at least in NYC. Google's integration with the MTA is seriously lacking—their directions often do not reflect scheduled changes in routes, let alone real-time issues. That said, Google Maps is superior with POI search and address decoding.

Adresses are notoriously hard, and it varies from country to country, and even within countries. I've been working on Japanese address data, and while you may be able to trust Google with an address in the city, there's a large probability that it'll send you somewhere else (sometimes > 10km) in rural areas.

I wonder if trying to support strange international address styles (like cities where the numbers on the street are in order of building permit issued, not ordinal from a center point) and/or trying to scan imagery for addresses is confusing it.

The fact it gets the street wrong indicates a tokenization issue somewhere.

Any evidence it happens to non-numeric streets like Main Street or Martin Luther Blvd, or is it only 10th st types of things?

I was on Seoul for 18 months, and despite significant study, I have, never been able to decode their system despite at least 100 requests for some insights.

>like cities where the numbers on the street are in order of building permit issued

Holy shit what an absolutely needless nightmare of a system. How do you expect people to find anything like that?

Japan is even worse than that, as they don't even use street names. The specific details depend on the municipality, but in summary:

- Municipalities are divided hierarchically into named neighborhoods, districts, wards, or "sections" (字/"aza", I don't know the correct translation). A single municipality might combine different kinds of divisions for historical reasons.

- Those are then divided into numbered blocks, plots, and buildings. The numbers are assigned in chronological order, and are rarely spatially sequential.

All in all, the system is extremely confusing, and the chaotic urban "planning" of most Japanese cities doesn't help. So how do people move around? They use maps; in the big cities like Tokyo there are street maps in all the major areas, otherwise you use your smartphone.

Hey, at least they have numbers!

In some areas the streets have no names, nor do the buildings have numbers.

If there’s three streets and twelve houses, why do you need any of those?

Ha, I was in charge of data quality for Google Maps going on 15 years ago. Addresses were hard then, and I'm sure they're hard now. Alas, Google didn't want to invest in keeping this data high quality — a fact to which I actually owe my first promotion at the company (since taking over Maps data quality was a job that nobody else particularly wanted — nor did they want to move to Seattle, where Google wanted the team — but it still gave a lot of room for impact).

Sometimes I dream of going back, but the culture has changed too much (and not for the better, I hear).

Google Maps decided my driveway is a road, and also gave it a (non-existent) name. I have attempted to update this information, but Google just rejects my suggestions as "not accepted".

So we now regularly get people driving down here or trying to park, when it's actually just a one-lane driveway.

double-check it on openstreetmap.org

It’s correct on there (and if it weren’t, I could fix it).

The real problem is that Google Maps isn't regulated like a utility. I know, I know, we all hate regulation, we love free markets, and all. But bear with me for a moment.

I had a problem where Google Maps showed the wrong location for my address. I reported the issue. I was told the correction was accepted. But it wasn't — Google Maps would still show the wrong location. After doing this dance several times over a course of weeks going into months, it would sometimes show the correct location, and sometimes the wrong one. I once had two people arrive in the same car, and each of their phones showed a different location in Google Maps.

The problem is that at this point Google Maps is so ubiquitous that people accept it as "truth". And that is a problem when it shows an incorrect location: people can't get to your place, package deliveries are delayed, etc.

Unfortunately, things that are so ubiquitous in our lives require regulation — at the very least, Google should be required to process (and verify) requests for corrections in a timely manner.

I used to work mapping in EMS. It is absolutely not that simple, nor will it ever be. Yes, Google was often wrong. Sometimes I would drive out to a street to make sure I had not lost my mind.

Sometimes, the local addressing authority was wrong, and I would have to prove it to them. "But it was checked!" It was checked wrong. Street numbers would be off by thousands. It would take some pointing out of obvious problems in the progression of numbers, plus a plat, plus an email from the building manager to prove to them that I knew what I was talking about.

I was contacted by a woman who kept having drivers for all kinds of services attempt to use her driveway as a street, even if she had a sign up, which she did. Her local municipality was no help. Nobody was. She was irked and frantic, as these trucks would destroy her driveway, lawn, even garden.

Much digging ensued. It turned out that the proximal source of the error was a statewide system, one of many which Google simply hoovers up and digests like a baleen whale siphoning up plankton, then digests and tries to "make work." I got the proximal source to make a correction, which they might publish in another three months. The original source of the error was a long-missing minor street from many decades ago, which I had to find in caches of searches and the like.

It was idle curiosity, but it took me about twenty hours of digging on evenings and weekends.

Address points are easy. Parcels, aka the polygons upon which zero to many address points might rest, are harder. Road networks are terrifically hard. I managed to catalog ten different cases of road discontinuity in the process of trying to find such things in an automatic fashion. And I might not be bright enough to have enumerated them all!

And then we have cases of people who deliberately insist that their address number is "00." As in the first two-thirds of a certain not-so-secret agent's code number. Or imagine the fools who decide to put up a sign at the end of their long driveway and simply declare that it was a road.

Each county has its own addressing standards, and included in each are addresses from the Olden Days, real wild west stuff, which the authorities are just itching to scrape out of their systems once and for all.

Road addressing is Fractally Bad.

In this particular case, Apple Maps seems to have it correct, so at least some official source of data must be right?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=136+W+6th+Ave%2C+Vancouver%2C+BC%2...

None of that applies in my particular case: my country does have a database of addresses and the lookup of the address in question (my address) did produce the correct geographic location.

It was Google that did not bother to update their data for years.

>I had a problem where Google Maps showed the wrong location for my address. I reported the issue. I was told the correction was accepted. But it wasn't — Google Maps would still show the wrong location. After doing this dance several times over a course of weeks going into months, it would sometimes show the correct location, and sometimes the wrong one. I once had two people arrive in the same car, and each of their phones showed a different location in Google Maps.

I've had this problem for the 10 years I've lived at my address. Google has even changed where they usually send people, which is just a different kind of wrong. Non-existent locations on the other side of town.

It's very frustrating. I usually give people the address of a nearby business. I dare not order food delivery.

Once I ordered a consumer product "next day delivery" which I had no idea would summon an Uber Eats driver. I texted him the correct location once he showed up to the incorrect one. When he got to my house Uber wouldn't even let him complete the delivery because his GPS was so far from what it thought the delivery location was. He had to call them to resolve it.

I've tried to correct it myself about 10 times. I have had all my friends try to correct it from their accounts.

I still don't think that Google Maps should be regulated though. I think it's a ridiculous thing to suggest. I just don't think regulation is the answer to every inconvenience.

If you directly use Google Maps Geocoding API you will see in response there what type of address is it and is it precise location or estimation.

A person I know just got the keys to their newly built house. Both Apple and Google maps still feature the demolished building that used to be where the group of new houses are. The street plan hasn't been updated. The old industrial building was demolished several years ago.

Openstreetmap already has the correct house outlines and the new street.

I already warned them that deliveries might be tricky for a few weeks/months.

Addressing is hard and errors are common. You can't blindly rely on maps to be correct or up to date.

I've noticed some really strange lapses in transit directions as well, though there it might be more directly blamed on the source.

Confusingly, for example, Google thinks it sometimes takes like 20 minutes for the metra electric to go from Van Buren to millennium stations (a distance of perhaps half a mile). What I believe is happening is it's using the departure time of the train from millennium station (it will layover for 15 minutes or so, presumably) as the arrival time.

I do not know whether Maps shares data with the Waymo service, but their pathing has driven me bonkers for awhile now.

Waymo is convinced that it is impossible for a pedestrian to walk from where I live to the east side of my lot (I live in multifamily, 300 units).

Waymo seems to have pedestrian pathing in mind, and will block the app from a walk that is too far away.

The landlady provides custom made pickup areas in the east lot, but Waymo keeps insisting on pickup and dropoff on the west side.

Adding insult to injury, the “set on map” feature of dragging the pin has been broken as well.

So I have to put up with it. I mean, they’re still in “testing phase” but I’ve given them such clear feedback, they are surely aware by now.

Good post Bruce. I’ve run into a lot of the same issues you described, especially working with last-mile and delivery companies where the addresses are a total mess. Things like “123 Main St, red gate, call 555-1234 when you arrive, Apt 4B” are very common, and even Google struggles when there’s too much extra info mixed into the address.

Because of that, I ended up building a tool called AddressHub that focuses mostly on cleaning up the input before sending it to geocoders. It tries to remove instructions, phone numbers, weird formatting, and fixes common spelling mistakes or street name variations. Then it sends the cleaned address through multiple geocoders, checks how close the results are to where they should be, and picks the best one.

It also caches results when possible (depending on the API terms) and tries open data first to save costs. Only if open data does not have a good result, it falls back to the paid geocoders.

This has helped a lot with reducing wrong deliveries caused by addresses that look fine at first glance but are actually way off. If anyone’s interested, the project is at www.address-hub.com. Always happy to get feedback if people have ideas for making it better.

My favorite address WTF (from when I worked at a startup that managed deliveries) was an apartment building in New York City. If you tried to geocode the full address of an individual apartment (123 Someplace St Unit 789, etc) it would fail - but an address without the unit would succeed!

This was particularly weird because normally the geocoder was fine with bogus unit numbers (eg on obvious single-family homes) but fell over in just this one case...

Just yesterday I was dealing with an auto-formatter for addressing which was failing to record Queens, NY addresses correctly. Google Maps seems to have no problem.

https://streeteasy.com/blog/queens-addresses-hyphenated-conf...

I deal with addresses as part of my day job.

The only consistent thing about addresses is that they're really not that consistent...

It's not only Google that has this issue; but the nature of addressing in general. It's not uncommon for the geocoders we use to be hundreds of metres off of the actual location of the address.

If it's this bad in BC, I can't imagine how bad it is in Japan.

The addresses there are notoriously local-centric, with knowledge of the area required, to find a physical location from the address.

All that being said, I wonder how long it will take people to get the memo: Don't use Goggle! For anything! Unless you like being surveilled (there's a fetish for everything, I guess)

I've used osmand on a (community build) android phone for about 8 years. It works great offline, all maps and the nav algorithm are in the phone, and it's gotten me to where I was going.

I'm hoping to migrate full time to a linux phone this year. The mega-corps have contributed to the long wait for this tech, but it does seem on the verge of finally breaking out of the lab.

I feel like Google Maps experienced a serious regression a few months ago.

Before that, it would give reasonable mass transit directions in San Francisco. After that, it would always use a bus to go even 1 block to BART, giving drastically inflated transit times.

Hmm. I saw the behavior you describe, but I also got the expected directions: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YpVHhPf1U9Ytu6U86

Interesting. I don't know what it means but if I delete the postal code from the 138 address in the map you link to then it goes back to displaying the bad location (with the postal code restored).

This smells like some weird caching, although I do most of my tests in an incognito window to minimize this.

Not sure it's related, but recently I tried to ask Google maps to find a way to a train station, and it confidently set the destination to the exit of a nearby highway. Yes, I double checked that I was using driving navigation, and it expected me to stop the car in the middle of the traffic.

And I have no idea what to do about this.

P.S. I never had good experience with reporting errors. Sometimes they are rejected despite absolutely being correct, or they end up having no effect at all.

The correct way to report errors to Google is to publicly blog about it until it reaches the HN front page and some Google insider sees it.

I've had this happen to me too. I would drive there, and while still on the highway Google says I've arrived. I don't stop the car in the middle of the traffic for obvious common sense reasons, I just switch to reading the signs nearby to get to the train station or the airport. When I grew up there wasn't turn-by-turn navigation at all, so I still treat it as merely an aid and not gospel.

I once wanted to fix a gym position in Google Maps. I bike in front of it everyday.

The response from GM was that they did an investigation and the address is correct. I replied to the dude in whatever country but not mine that I bike there daily and they even have a clean picture on street view.

Then suddenly after a year, or if the blue, I got a Thanks To You It Is Fixed automated email.

This is a weird company.

On my city there are a couple tram stops that were moved a decade or so ago. Google maps still show them at the old locations. All the comments say this, all the photos show this, even street view show it! But any time I send a change request it is rejected.

I've always wondered who reviews the requests, if you are a local, or even spend 2 minutes checking, you'll notice the mistake...

This seems like an optimist, imagining an ordered world, which sadly does not exist.

Whatever assumption you think will always hold true for addresses, will not in practice. Even in places that appear strictly patterned.

The suggestion to guess addresses that "should exist" is just clearly wrong. If someone buys two plots of land and builds a larger building, an address normally vanishes.

In my case, at least Google Maps knows the city where I live. Apple Maps has my whole neighborhood in a nearby city.

I had similar problems until recently, now Apple Maps is better. I fully expect the situation to change again in future.

I'm shocked at how bad Google handles street addresses in Europe and Latin America. I'll concede that some regions have bizzaro numbering conventions, but Google Maps has been around a long time now and those formats have stayed the same. If anything, the situation seems even worse on recent trips.

Google _could_ cross reference home addresses and home locations from phones with Google Maps.

They don’t need to understand how addresses work, just trust that most users have put in their home address correctly.

If we’re going to have all our data siphoned up and aggregated it would be nice if there were some useful side benefits.

Use Google Plus Codes OR Irish Eircode. street addresses are nonsensical prehistoric waste of database space.

Plus code also has the name 'Open Location Code', free to use, requires GPS or the ability to accurately generate such addresses. (Sufficient accuracy could be attained by plotting each intersection as a co-ordinate.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code

yeah and i just realized how much of burden unicode is, in street addresses ... (is not needed in coordinate based systems.)

If the 'addressee' is some human read blob that the shipping stuff and even postal carriers don't need to read, great. Heck it might be nice if everyone globally had their own UUID which could even get a lookup to 'current desired delivery address'.

Re: Unicode

Some sort of baseline protocol that just flattened everything out to what's really used and left behind anything remotely like Emoji ( E.G. Just 'single pen (monochrome imprint) compatible' Unicode ) might be useful enough.

I will likely forever absolutely loath how UCS-2 ended up baked into UTF-8 and the Unicode namespace generally _forever_ so that it gets kneecapped at an arbitrary low page size and yet still majorly complicates decoders that have to map around that inanity.

I think I'd want to review the 'Advanced Sub Station' bitstream format for inspiration of useful ways to extend 'font' operations. Any sort of 'color' or 'combining' operation would be relegated to _advanced_ / extended (not required) use cases and treated as a blob associated with either a single rune/character or a special meta character that denotes a sequence length. Among a bunch of other changes that would probably also include dropping UTF-8's 'resynchronize at next character' design in favor of some other mechanism that might include a simple checksum, and could change preferred encoding length at the next resynchronization.

> that’s 1.5 miles or 123 furlongs

Surely that's a typo and supposed to be 12.3 furlongs? Even that might be slightly incorrect.

Whoops! Good catch. That was supposed to be 12 furlongs. Apparently I have no intuitive sense of how long a furlong is so I didn't notice my typo

can they at least fix the interstate highway exits it thinks are splits? why do I need to be told to keep left at random exits?

what if the postal code is wrong on google maps compared to the one on government file? anything that opens up?

Google Maps has declined remarkably two or three years. It’s now an ML-brained mess. Like the rest of Google. Apple Maps is actually better now! That’s incredible.

It's been a bit more than that; about four years ago they started using machine-analyzed satellite photos to override street geometry in my neighborhood and decided that a parking lot is a through street; since then, nobody who uses Google Maps can get to my house because Google Maps directs them to drive down that parking lot (which has a brick wall in it and is not a through street). I've filed this as a data issue maybe a half-dozen times and it gets fixed and then breaks again a couple of months later in the exact same way. Drives me crazy. OpenStreetMaps and Apple Maps are both correct.

I don't recall last time Google Maps made a mistake for me. I'm sure it has messy data.

I don't envy developers that have to work with geography or timezones. And Google Map devs have to work with both. Ouch.

Google Maps often has problems adding stops between where I am and where I’m going. I experience this the most when I’m driving cross country on an interstate and I search for restaurants. It often thinks I should turn around and drive back 5 miles to go to some restaurant that I’m guessing is paying Google to send it traffic.

What I really I want are options between where I am to where I might be in 30 minutes.

That’s because it simply orders results based on distance from your location. That’s it. It just doesn’t have an ordering method that considers your route.

So, I've been in a position where I have helped do address verification for a school district. In some states, schools have to verify where students live because property taxes often pay for schools, so knowing where your students live determines your tax funding (and for missing children laws). I've worked with thousands of addresses now, and seen a lot of uncommon situations.

Google Maps is really bad when streets are even slightly unusual. That's even with North American address conventions, which are extremely regular by comparison to many nations.

For example, if you have both a North and a South version of a road, and the address numbering for North and South versions overlaps -- say, North and South begin at a county midline road and North increases going north and South increases going south -- it will irregularly put a pin on the wrong road or wrong segment of road.

Similarly, it will be confused if you have River Rd and West River Rd. And it can be confused when Oak Ln becomes Oak Ct or insist that Oak Ct is really Oak Ln even when the road name actually changes.

It also gets very confused by roads that have two names. For example if there's a county line road, the east county might call it "Franklin Rd" while the west county calls it "E County Line Rd." And in that case the east side of the road have one set of addresses, and the west have another set. Worse, the address numbers often don't align. Except that's not what Google screws up that often. Instead, Google will sometimes insist that one or the other road doesn't exist at all. It will say that 123 E County Line Rd is actually 123 Franklin Rd, and then it will put a pin where 123 would be on Franklin Rd if that road didn't begin its address numbering at 3000.

Sometimes it insists the city is incorrect, too. If your address is "123 Miller Rd, New London" and New London is a tiny unincorporated town near Portland, Google might translate the name to "123 Miller Rd, Portland." Sometimes even when there's a street the next county over with an address "123 Miller Rd, Portland". In this case if you enter the Portland address, it will point you to the address actually in Portland, and if you put in the New London address, it will show you the New London address... but it will still correct your New London address to Portland.

If you have a road with breaks in it, such as for a river without a bridge, it will occasionally just... put a pin at the end of one segment of the road and not find the address on the correct segment on the far side of the break.

About the only things that's really consistent is: If you zoom in and the pin is in the middle of the road, then Google Maps probably can't find the address. On the other hand, if the pin is off the road, then it's probably exactly on the structure based on the local or municipal authority and their GIS data. In that case, Google found the address on the GIS data they got from that municipality.

And you might say, "Oh, but those are really easily confusing things! It's entirely understandable." And, maybe that's true. But USPS's ZIP code finder still knows the addresses well enough to both find and correct them for you, and ArcGIS interfaces also seem to be able to find things much more easily. Google Maps was groundbreaking 20 years ago. But it really hasn't kept pace. The only thing that seems to confuse the other sites is new construction. At the very least, I wish Google Maps would be more clear when it's guessing rather than when it's found an exact match.

All that is to say, yes, we did use Google Maps to help find addresses. But when things looked even a little weird, we assumed that Google Maps was wrong. And it usually was wrong in those cases. And what it got wrong was sometimes really, really wrong.

Same here... around 2-3 years ago the driving route out of my neighborhood changed to always be down a set of (human-only) stairs. After a while it did change back, but it's not trustworthy anymore.

Soon we can tell the younger generations that when we were young, Google was almost magic, it could find the most obscure stuff.. nowadays, not so much.

It's strange how different peoples experiences are. I use Google maps all the time and it's been years since it made any significant mistake for me.

What decline are you noticing? I don't see how it has become any more of an "ML-brained mess".

Google maps are definitely bad. I think maybe Apple, as underdog in this space, has more motivation to curate the data better.

I love OsmAnd+ myself. Just werks.

It used to suggest some good alternate results. Is it Turing complete?

Dunning-Kruger effect on full display.

Should be "the writer of this article has no idea how street addresses actually work in the real world".

Seems like Vancouver is the problem

Google maps knows nothing but what the programmers tell it. It's not self aware yet. The engineers, using Google colored bikes rely on a broken street system in Palo Alto. I rode a bike around the campus wiping Macintoshes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com