About two years ago, I was cruising around on Google Maps, and I decided to zoom in to the small town where my parents grew up, and where I lived, briefly, in my infancy.
My grandparents (and also my great-grandfather) lived on a private road named “Osborne Road”.
So imagine my consternation when I was looking at Google Maps, and found that road named, “Osborn Road”.
I sent Google a message:
“The correct spelling of the name is “Osborne”, with the “e” at the end. Cite: My great grandfather, Jesse Osborne, built the first house on this road. My grandfather, Charles Osborne, and his brother, Harold Osborne, also built houses on this road. The road is named for my family. And we spell our name “Osborne”.”
It took a few months, but today I got this reply from Google:
“Hi Rik,
Google Maps has been updated to correct the problem you reported. You can see the update here:”
And there it is, on Google Maps, my ancestral home street with my family name spelled correctly:
I’ve sent corrections for a few things, such as placements of shops, or where tourists thought a photo was taken but they’re at the wrong-but-similar beach 40km away, that kind of thing. Never had a follow-up to check if they corrected them, though.
I don’t ask much of Google Maps. Only, y’know, that they might make it work. Since their latest “upgrade”, it’s been totally utterly unusable on my machine (due to my older browser I suspect). It worked just fine for me before, and when they brought out the new version, the older version was still available also for a while. Why not just keep that available too? All I can get now is a blank screen.
So I tried it on another machine with newer software. Here, I was able to play with it, but I guess I would have to invest in ever newer stuff, including hardware, or else all I can get is “Lite” mode which is horribly crippled.
Is anybody finding the new Google Maps to be an improvement?
I played with bing maps a bit today. It’s not obvious if it is as good as the older google maps, but at least it’s superficially usable.
Lately, I’m seeing weird things happening with gmail too. There seem to be three different landing pages, one or another of which I seem to get a random. That annoys me. Worst, one of those landing pages doesn’t even have a sign-in box and no apparent way to get to another screen that might. It appears solely usable for non-users to be able to create a new account, with lots of links to pages with introductory information, but no way to sign in to an existing account. WTF Google?
I didn’t expect street view. The road in question is … for all intents and purposes, “Bumfuck, Western Washington”. Who cares?
Well, I cared. That’s the road where some of my earliest moments were experienced. I actually remember my great-grandfather, despite the fact that he died when I was 4 years old. I have memories.
I sent them a correction once, too. If you followed their directions to the Albany Curling Club, it took you to the right street but on the wrong side of the New York State Thruway. Not any more.
I did the same, although my cite wasn’t as good as yours. It took them awhile, but no grousing. The issue was that they had “ie” when it should be “ei”. Not bumfuck, just a glaring error.
Pre-Google, either Yahoo and/or Mapquest wanted you to make a left turn over the median to leave the street I grew up on. I don’t think there was a way to report back then beyond hunting for an email and crossing your fingers.
The mapping here in the northeast, on at least the two biggest services (Navteq and the others, including Google) is abysmal. Most addresses in my area are off by hundreds of feet. There are many places where the Honda’s nav mapping is so far off the system freaks - we routinely drive one stretch of 202 where the marker has us in the river, 200 feet from the road.
I am not sure how such major errors can persist for so long, or how so much wonky data could get into the system in the first place. But they sure haven’t corrected it in 5+ years.
I sent them a correction once that they had marked a pair of driveways as a road where the actual road (Red Bud Lane) was actually a little to the south. Something like a year later I got notice from them that they’d changed it.
I reported an error many years ago. A street near us was shown as continuing on for 1.5 blocks past its dead-end. I reported it.
It’s still there. The “extra” part is shown as unpaved now, but there is nothing road-like there at all. A chain and a no trespassing sign. It’s power company property so there was never any planned road into either.
I was using Google to navigate to a casino in Northern California that is located on Rancheria Road. It’s pronounced Ran-che-REE-a. But Google insisted that it was Ran-CHAIR-ee-a. I laughed every time she said it.
A fight is what someone’s in for when they get hit with bogus copyright claims on Youtube. Good luck fighting Google and their “guilty and can’t even prove you’re innocent if you are” policy.
No, I’ve never had to fight Google that way, I don’t upload to youtube, but I feel really bad for lots of people who have.
I’m glad you got your family’s name corrected on the map, though, that’s a good thing.