Google still defaults to miles for some reason.
I get that these cases have their differences, but I think it’s reasonably thought provoking and worth at least a single moment of attention if we’re already on the topic.
The EO you referenced is about what units the federal government uses, not setting an official system of measurement for the entire US.
Well, actually, no.
The EO changes the official name of the geographical feature as recognized by the US government.
All the large map providers ingest a data feed from the USG (and other governments for other localizations) which names various geographical and place entities. That data goes through a pipeline (basically a CI pipeline) to build the map artifact and tiles served to users.
Google just has a particularly good and low latency pipeline. Google got there in a couple days. Apple will get there in a week or two. The USGS will get there in god-knows-when. Mapquest has said they’re not going to update the name, which presumably means their pipeline is old and creaky.
The article itself even acknowledges that the USGS GNIS database has already been updated to reflect the change. Unless someone at Google manually edits the entity, it will be automatically renamed with no human input (although, for very large, highly visible entities the validation stage may block the build and flag it for manual review)
> The USGS will get there in god-knows-when.
> The article itself even acknowledges that the USGS GNIS database has already been updated to reflect the change.
Yes, both USGS and the Department of the Interior's executive leadership have been replaced by this Administration with Trump lackeys who fell over themselves to boast in a memo just how quickly they'd made the change.
> Mapquest has said they’re not going to update the name, which presumably means their pipeline is old and creaky.
No, it means no such thing.