I deal with this with one of the web sites I maintain.
I think, as noted in the article, that it seems Google sometimes uses names from advertisements as if they are canonical.
In my case, the city in question puts out a very specific, very legally defined map of each neighborhood, and has for more than a century. But real estate agents make up names for the neighborhoods, or fudge the boundaries to improve selling prices (thus commissions) and make their offerings more attractive.
About a year after a new neighborhood name is invented by a real estate agency, it starts showing up on Google maps. Then I have to deal with people complaining that our locations are mislabeled, because if it's on Google, it must be right.
It happens so often that I have an e-mail macro to respond to these people. And since the web site is very well respected by the locals, a couple of times a year I get requests from real estate agents, developers, and others, to change our maps to match their needs.
I got a particularly ridiculous one just this week saying that it's "our policy" (the real estate developer's) that maps should be drawn along a certain set of lines, and that we (the web site) are required to adhere to their policy.
"I think, as noted in the article, that it seems Google sometimes uses names from advertisements as if they are canonical."
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"Currently the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising... We expect that commercial search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers..." - Sergey Brin and Larry Page, 1998
> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine.
> But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine.
> In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
"For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine."
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If you go and search "Delta" today on Google, the top result is an advertisement for Delta that points to delta.com.
1. Let's make a better search engine.
2. Let's put ads on our search engine.
3. Let's create our own ad network so that we can control what ads look like, so they're unobtrusive.
4. People like our ads, let's put them on other people's pages.
5. People want more interesting ads, let's expand out.
6. Our business relies on ads, we need to collect more user data so we can focus ads even better than our competitors.
By doing advertising 'better' they could make a better product. Unfortunately, they went down the exact same path that other advertisers did: getting more invasive and more aggressive and less user-centric. I hate slippery slope arguments, but this seems to apply in retrospect.
Most of the steps down this slippery slope were likely to the end of providing a better service. that is why it is insidious, you don't need to act "the love of money" to end up serving "the love of money"
> I’d love a detailed account of the process which derailed these moral ideals. Anyone?
It's relatively easy and fits into what Google has been doing: they want advertising to fit the (current) needs of the consumer, and the better the fit, the more money they can command for ad slots - compared to the "old guard" which simply firehosed advertising around without any kind of conversion tracking or effectiveness.
For example, when I'm in Munich and searching for a haircut and I get ads for a haircutter in Berlin, that ad money is wasted for the advertiser, and I as a customer lose one potential spot for a Munich based haircutter. When Google now shows me an ad for a Munich haircutter, or even better, one that is less than 5min of walking away, then both the haircutter benefits (from my haircut) and I benefit (for not having to walk more than I need to).
Or, to expand on this example, metadata like opening hours - advertising for a store that is closed is wasted money when I need an open store.
All that acquisition of ever more data is what drives Google: the more data they possess, the more fine they can tailor your advertising, and thus be geared towards both advertisers and users at the same time. After all, if the ads aren't effective, the advertisers will pack up shop and leave, and the users will be frustrated because they don't get what they need.
They later acknowledged that ads could give better experience. Their earlier beliefs in the beginning were probably based on the ads at that time. 1 search engine didn't distinguish bw search results and ads, leading to bad user experience. Clearly, Google eliminated this.
San Francisco also puts out an official map, but like many other official maps, it lacks many of the neighborhoods people expect to find: Sunnyside, Japantown, the Tenderloin, Dogpatch, Hunters Point, Mission Bay, Hayes Valley, Miraloma, Cow Hollow... and so in order to give users what they want and expect, Google has to gather data from other sources.
What makes the maps that the city makes up better than the ones that the real estate agents make up? If people are using the latter to determine where to live, doesn't that define a neighborhood?
What makes the maps that the city makes up better than the ones that the real estate agents make up?
In this case, the city designations are important because each year the city divides a pot of money that goes to supplemental infrastructure improvements in each neighborhood.
Because it's supplemental money, it is a fixed amount for each neighborhood. If a neighborhood's boundaries increase, then money available for improvements in that neighborhood is stretched thinner. If a neighborhood's boundaries shrink, then more money is available for improvements per block.
This is why boundaries matter, and why they are codified.
That's a good reason for why the city shouldn't arbitrarily change its official definitions of neighborhood boundaries without also changing budget allocations.
Why shouldn't everyone else define neighborhoods however they feel is most useful to them?
I realise it could be a problem if words become unrecognised, but there's already a few spelling variations among neighbours. People are flexible. Heck, they can understand eevn wehn yuo wrte lkie tihs.
> Heck, they can understand eevn wehn yuo wrte lkie tihs.
Not aywlas. I keep sineeg tihs, and ftnrqleeuy fnid mlesyf nidneeg to dcgrusaioe (or at lesat cllhgeane) the ptsooiin. For slaml wdros it can wrok, but I fnid tihs is iltnrheeny dcfuliift (and dnniirag, as wlel as fttrrnsaiug!) to raed, and dns'eot slace to let you raed in a ceorneht fhisoan oevr a ranblaosee poierd wtih mtlui-sllibyac wrods.
Iiagnme a cueopmtr sncciee or poolsghcyy txet dylpaeisd or ogzeriand tihs way. It wulod be ulllnntiigbee, or at the vrey bset a sptmbuioal mhoted of trrrnfnseiag lraeg qnttaiiues of dlteeiad itfrimaoonn atalccurey.
Hope there aren't any spelling mistakes, I tried to ensure everything was correct before I messed with it. I spent way too long on this, and since I've tried to check everything out I need a break. It was still quite enjoyable to do, although I'm sure it had a negative impact on my spelling.
> Not always. I keep seeing this, and frequently find myself needing to discourage (or at least challenge) the position. For small words it can work, but I find this is inherently difficult (and draining, as well as frustrating!) to read, and doesn't scale to let you read in a coherent fashion over a reasonable period with multi-syllabic words.
Imagine a computer science or psychology text displayed or organized this way. It would be unintelligible, or at the very best a suboptimal method of transferring large quantities of information accurately.
But if you're going to mess up words and claim readability, why not take out spaces and see how you might fare?
Or scramble words in sentences without spaces, too?
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Quite readable. Cant' vouch for spelling mistakes, or lack thereof :)
Your compiler isn't going to care about your opinion of the prettiest way to spell "print". Your lawyer is going to have strong opinions about how you spell you name and address on the contract you're about to sign.
Sure, if you're writing poetry, you get to choose everything. If you need what you write to be as close to unambiguously understood as possible to other people (or machines) - then you need to follow the norms and common uses of words, and spell them and use grammar that other people agree on.
(Neighborhood names might well be closer to "poetry" than "reserved words in a computer language", but if we then become beholden to commission-driven real estate agents to define our local nomenclature from a purely personal profit seeking motivation - I think I'd rather have some anonymous city bureaucrat responsible for drawing the lines and choosing the labels...)
My compiler doesn't allow me to make up spelling in my code, but my friends are fine with me making up alternate spelling when I text them. Not everything is computer code or legal documents.
The names that bureaucrats or real estate agents give to neighborhoods has never mattered to me. Why do you think we have to be beholden to it? My point is that you're free to call your neighborhood whatever you want. I'm sure you're capable of figuring out which name is appropriate to use depending on the context of your conversation.
In most of the USA outside of San Francisco, authoritarianism is frowned upon. In China and SF, the government is more free to tell people how to speak and live. It's a cultural difference.
Agents will arbitrarily change maps basted on what their current listing are and would happily change them daily. Longer term there is little point changing place names as changing demographics will eventually adjust the meaning of these names even if no lines move on a map.
Nobody/Everybody, if people start calling a region by a name it makes sense to record the usage and put it on the map. Sure, it probably makes perfections and planners twitch but it makes maps more useful.
I notice a lot of Americans love referring to Canada as “Canadia”. I can’t make a bit of sense out of it, but by your logic we should update the maps already.
You can't change my username, but you don't have to refer to me by my official username. Furthermore, it's ok that my government ID doesn't say daveFNbuck even though I'm using it as my name here.
There are almost no situations where people refer to me by the name in my government records, and that's fine. Those records still work for their intended purpose and there's no need to update them to match my nicknames or aliases.
The issue here isn’t that Google got the name wrong, but that they actively chose a new one and could change it to the new one because the public depends on a private entity’s map system and that private entity is able to manipulate the representation in their own private interest.
>If< I didn’t like you and I were able to change your name on every non-public record to “Fucking Idiot” (Job applications, Facebook, Twitter, GMail, etc.), maybe you wouldn’t mind that. Or maybe you would mind it and I convinced you to not mind it by explaining how it wouldn’t effect your government records. (I doubt the residents in question mind the name “The East Cut” either, but they already had one and preferred it. In many of these name changes, the effects can mean rapid mass development, raised rents and evictions, etc.) For you, this name change would mean at least a lot of explaining how this obnoxious poster on Hacker News was trying to make some disparate point but it has nothing to do with your qualification for the job, getting your account banned from Social media sites. You could start a new one but you’d lose all your posts and followers. At the end of the day, you should probably have been able to stop me, but you couldn’t.
If Google were doing something malicious that caused real and important harm, I'd probably agree with you that what they were doing was wrong. I don't see the harm here, and I don't see malice. They weren't doing this capriciously, they were doing this at the behest of a nonprofit created by the community.
Right. If nothing harmful has been reported by New York Times by now, then I’m sure nothing could ever go wrong.
I’m critiquing the shape of the system and the potential for harm. The municipal duties our ancestors fought to have managed through democratic processes we love to pride ourselves on are swiftly being surrendered to private corporations who citizens widely do not trust. And then we wait until the damage is irreversible and pretend we weren’t asking for it.
I don't think our ancestors fought to ensure that mapmaking could only be done through democratic processes. The usual story we like to tell ourselves about this country is that our ancestors fought to give us freedom, not to ensure that the government would have the final say on how we're allowed to identify our neighborhoods.
You say you critiqued the potential for harm and that you've warned me, but I don't believe that you've done that. You've explained how similar changes to other systems could potentially harm me, but you haven't explained how changing neighborhood names on Google maps could lead to harm.
The maps made by the city have legal impact. They control everything from funding to allocation of community resources. For example, in my city each neighborhood has an official community association that is acts as a liaison to the city.
Improvement projects are also designated by neighborhood, long term planning and resource allocation is on a per-neighborhood basis.
City council determines the areas within a city; it is NOT made up. Some areas are much more popular than others. Leaving this to random people is absurd. The areas don't suddenly change.
Anyway, this is how it is like in The Netherlands.
Neighborhoods imply far more than geography; things like culture, traditions, cooperation, people define a neighborhood. This is, among other things, the contents of trust. The idea of a foundation on which to make a happy life amongst they neighbors can involve many different things, so it’s vague, but the most important part is that the participants themselves are who develops the neighborhood; not capitalists trying to profit from it.
Gentrification is a prime example of where this becomes a cruel and unusual form of manipulation, but it’s not the only one.
What Google is doing should absolutely be considered a crime.
>> The company declined to detail how some place names came about, though some appear to have resulted from mistakes by researchers, rebrandings by real estate agents — or just outright fiction.
Every lawyer knows what is happening. Copyright 101 - you cannot copyright facts, a big deal for mapmakers. Google is pulling data from a map created by someone else. They are quiet about it because they do not want whoever owns that original map to catch wind that their work acts as source material for google maps.
Some map creators fight this by adding fictitious names, even streets, into maps. You can copyright fiction. So if your fake street name gets used in some other map you may have a case (the same game happened with phonebooks). No doubt google cross-checks source maps to detect such things. So it is no surprise that from this shady little battle we get the occasional strange name.
My work moved buildings a year ago (military facility). We have been trying to get our location changed on google maps for over a year, but are constantly refused. No matter what we say, taxis and pizza deliveries still go to the wrong place (a couple blocks away). Whatever source maps google uses obviously trump our opinions. We are debating installing a sign at the old location. Maybe google streetview will see it.
Have you tried registering with “Google My Business”? I update a local businesses address though that (when they moved location) and it was updated on the maps immediately (possibly a few days delay at most).
I don;t think registering a military airbase on "google my business" is appropriate. We aren't a secret location, but still aren't focused on increasing our web presence. We just want the bus and taxi companies to come to the correct place when we call them. (They never listen to the address we give them. They google us and drive to wherever google maps says.)
We tried the "report and error" and "claim this business" functions on maps. Both were rejected. I got a note from a moderator person saying the new location was a construction site, which it was three years ago. Now we are in the new building.
My previous condo address # suddenly changed to adjacent number in google 2 years ago. I edited multiple times to the correct address and my corrections were rejected every time . Even submitting a government website showing the correct address didn't work. As I had moved I didnt care anymore but a few weeks ago I got a notification that 1 of my edits was approved.
You have to wonder if this has anything to do with their Neighborly app. Maps are how we collectively tell our stories and controlling the language used in those stories affects the outcome. Remember when everyone was calling that chunk of SOMA with the shitty overpriced condos the East Cut? What ever happened to all the people that lived there after the crash?
>I got a particularly ridiculous one just this week saying that it's "our policy" (the real estate developer's) that maps should be drawn along a certain set of lines, and that we (the web site) are required to adhere to their policy.
I walk through The East Cut nearly every day, and I admit I was confused by the rebranding. But it wasn't done by Google. There are people cleaning the sidewalks in East Cut shirts, banners that say East Cut, real estate companies that call it East Cut. It would be a little weird if Google ignored the name.
Yes, "The East Cut" is a strange name. But that area as never part of South Beach (which is also a strange name given that there is no beach). It wasn't really Rincon Hill, it is the area below Rincon Hill and is at sea level.
The East Cut is part of the larger South of Market area, and some of it could be considered to be the southern part of the Financial District[1]. But the neighborhood has evolved into its own thing, and deserves its own name.
It's somewhat problematic when Google starts to become an arbitrator of real-world boundaries, as there is functionally no oversight or recourse for those affected. Google was not appointed by the residents, is not incentivized to avoid damaging changes, and is functionally impossible to hold responsible - they're an opaque monolith to anyone who tries to effect change or revert their decisions, and their black box-esque tendencies make it impossible to know the policies or algorithms that determine their actions, making it infeasible to work around or prevent behaviors with a negative impact.
While in this case the impacts are fairly minor (with the exception of the border incident mentioned), this article is emblematic of the greater problem with tech giants in the information era: They cannot be regulated, managed, or held responsible for their behaviors, and have gained - and continue to gain - nigh-unprecedented influence over a staggering number of aspects our daily lives, without being chosen to do so by the people affected.
> The East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group in San Francisco that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area. The nonprofit paid $68,000 to a “brand experience design company” to rebrand the district.
> Mr. Robinson said his team asked Google to add the East Cut to its maps. A Google spokeswoman said employees manually inserted the name after verifying it through public sources.
The residents voted to create a non-profit to improve the area, the board of the non-profit voted on the name and then asked google to add it to the map. What is the problem here? How is google in any way at fault?
I am strongly suspicious that the contingent of residents that hired the nonprofit is not all of the residents, and the people objecting to the new name decided to try and use google maps as their battle ground.
I am not trying to assign correctness, it might be that a developer came in and started the rebranding project to raise property values in objection to other residents, or the objectors might just be curmudgeons, the article doesn't provide enough information to tell.
Yea, a fine example is the china-india border which google displays differently to residents of china, india and pakistan.
This is one of those edge cases I love to hate in software dev. It's nice to imagine everything has a real value out there somewhere, but some data points don't actually have a clear definition _anywhere_.
The same old problem with Google's dominance. In this case, Google is just another publisher of such a map, there are others with equivalent services; that way it doesn't seem troubling.
Indeed, the article complains about names 'just being made up' but fails to provide any evidence of that actually happening. Instead, all the other odd names they call out actually originated somewhere in the community, albeit perhaps from esoteric sources.
What's more, NYT seems to willfully ignore that place names change and evolve constantly through natural social processes just like these. That Google is indexing this makes them no more the arbiter of it than a library is the arbiter of all knowledge.
>Indeed, the article complains about names 'just being made up'
Unlike all those other placenames like "South of Market" which were decreed by god when he created San Fransisco :P
What they're really getting at is that it was made up by the wrong people. Like anything else that once happened organically among groups of people, you can now wrangle up an advertising budget and push it along.
My neighborhood has a "real" neighborhood name and a silly sub-neighborhood name that gets brought up once a year for a block party. If real estate developers thought the name was valuable, I bet it would mysteriously become a lot more popular.
> In San Francisco, the East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area.
How are these the "wrong" people to be naming the neighborhood?
It's funny how the article simultaneously complains about using the "wrong" name for East Cut while also saying that the same area has three other names the locals know it by. It seems like no one agrees on the official name
One of the cities I’m most familiar with (Cambridge) has a set of neighborhood names and boundaries that a lot of people would more or less agree with. But they’re by no means canonical and not all the boundaries are especially rigid.
Plus there are plenty of sub-neighborhood names that do get used but don’t really define any meaningful community or other enclave.
Some cities do seem to take a more active role in defining official neighborhoods but many don’t.
That's more an issue of how US society is presently structured.
Money (spent) IS speech.
Want to speak more or louder? Spend more money.
True, community efforts to agree socially on something also matter, but it takes much more social capital than it does cash capital to affect such changes.
Even if it wasn't Google they wouldn't be the first to influence the naming of neighbourhoods. Telephone companies used to have a similar authoritative role:
> Barry F. Hersh, a professor at the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University, said online maps were only the latest tool in a long line of technology influencing geography. “The telephone company once decided which neighborhood you were in,” he said.
Yes, another article from the Times complaining that they don't get to make up neighbourhood names anymore ("newspapers used to disseminate new names") but Google does.
Most importantly the neighborhood names are spatially non-exclusive. So the first paragraph is already somewhat incorrect.
SOUTH OF MARKET, SOUTH BEACH and RINCON HILL are all clickable labels, which assigned areas are at least partially overlapping with what is labelled THE EAST CUT.
Names are kind of a consensus thing - that place is(will be) called East Cut if and only if a sufficiently large part of the people who talk about the area call it East Cut.
Conversely, if most people do start calling it East Cut, you will be obligated to do the same if you want people to understand what you mean, since if you'll say "Rincon" they'll (mis)understand it as an area that explicitly excludes territory which they now call otherwise.
I take it you've never asked for directions in a small town? Of course as far as that reasoning takes you, you're correct. I'm pointing out that there is _not_ consensus.
I also refer to the Emperor Norton Memorial Bridge, which is my own small contribution to building consensus on naming a different geographic feature.
I’ve found exactly zero people who recognize the name “Rincon Hill,” including Bay Area natives. I get stuck describing it as “east of SOMA, south of the Financial District, kinda near the Ferry Building and Salesforce Tower” before people recognize what I’m talking about. So I don’t mind the initiative to give it a single crisp name.
But that name certainly wasn't the name the natives gave it before the Spanish expedition came around. Names change over time. Sometimes because of rebranding, sometimes because of hostile takeover of foreign land.
Call it what you want, but I don't see the point of being concerned over the change.
I get postal mail for someone living a few blocks away because they're technically in another suburb with a slightly worse reputation, and their real estate agent sold them on the idea they were in my suburb instead.
The post office, however, isn't paying attention to marketing or non-profit interest groups, it's paying attention to council zoning and regulation.
So every so often, I get mail addressed to a street name similar to mine, but in the next suburb over.
Names change over time, but when there's a central registry of names with a democratically founded process for managing those names, and the names are a public utility for locating things, it's best we don't just shit all over it and make up whatever we like because it suits us at the time.
Isn't the East Cut referring the old name for the area (Second Street Cut) when it was the location of all the mansions before the cable cars enabled them to move to Russian Hill?
The East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group in San Francisco that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area. The nonprofit paid $68,000 to a “brand experience design company” to rebrand the district. [...] and one of the East Cut nonprofit’s board members is a Google employee.
Inverted pyramid is for those other newspapers I guess
Yeah, the top half of the article is all-but-lying to you, strongly implying that Google just created the name out of mid-air. Which is typical newspaper/NYT behavior.
I worked in the "east cut" apparently. Outside of the Leaning Tower of San Francisco I don't remember a lot of people living in the area. Maybe they were farther south.
Google puts far too much stock into the "accuracy" of its Maps data.
Here's my fun story: in order to verify my dad's website with Google's 'My Business' service (now a defunct product?), they had to mail a physical postcard with PIN code to ensure the address was legitimate. Picking the mailing address was hooked into Maps/ Maps data; a "real" address had to be among their existing database of addresses.
Well, my dad lives in a somewhat-rural area outside St. Louis. His street is "Alt Road" -- named after the Alt family, German immigrants who started a large farm in the area 150+ years ago.
Yet Google Maps had the street listed as "Alternate Road". Clearly some data entry person presumed it must be an abbreviation and took liberty to 'correct' the apparent mistake.
So it was literally impossible to have a postcard mailed to his address on Alt Road. I had to have it sent to Alternate Road instead. I recognize, of course, the verification steps taken thereafter will have permanently corroborated what was bad data in first place. Now I'm part of the problem.
I'm guessing Maps will now forever have renamed the street. Should I alert the county to Dad's 'new' mailing address?
The county couldn't care less what Google Maps shows. Outside large cities, Google Maps is often pretty inaccurate, just outside Seattle in Kitsap County, Google Maps has yet to gain the 300k renumbered addresses that the county put into place over the last five years. Makes Google Maps fairly useless except where locals have manually updated their favorite stores and the like.
The funny thing is, Google can get updated road info in a timely manner as most counties offer a weekly dump of their map data. Open Street Maps is often on point in rural areas due to pulling these weekly dumps, meanwhile the 3rd party vendors Google buys their address data from rarely pull down the publicly owned dataset, contributing to the shoddy quality of Google Maps outside most cities.
Have you tried using the "Send Feedback" menu option in Google maps? It can take some time (on the order of weeks), but I've found they do seem to be responsive to feedback about incorrect data.
I'm not the OP but I have found this menu option to be incredibly useless. Google Maps has strangely lost the ability to point to my address and has refused to fix it for many years now. What's most frustrating is that the "Send Feedback" option offers no way to specify that an address is in the incorrect place, I can only select roads. I have resorted to trying to explain the problem in text but they never got back to me.
Every time a HN thread like this pops up I write about my annoyance with this and nobody has any solution apart from this suggestion. It shouldn't be this hard. Open Street Map is a breath of fresh air in comparison.
I wonder about this type of stuff since the place I am at now has no mailable address other than a PO Box. During my high school years, I remember ordering packages with "House 313 behind the School" or "House 313 School Loop" to satisfy the place we were order from. The UPS driver would know where to drop it off, and US Mail made you pick it up anyway.
And the reverse, near me, there's a "South Extension Road" South and Road might reasonably be abbreviated: "S Extension Rd." but Google maps just displays "S Ext Rd" and businesses have addresses of "123 S Ext Rd".
Maps are, infamously, a place where "truth" is not usually an attainable goal. All cartographers are faced with the decision between creating a map that is uncontroversial vs. one that is useful. When possible they optimize for both, but when the two (frequently) are in opposition to one another, it's time to choose.
> Matthew Hyland, [...] said he considered those all made-up names, some of which he deleted from the map
Unfortunately all place names are made-up names. If everyone suddenly agrees to start calling a place by a new name, who is Google to argue? But what if people can't agree and some start calling it by a new name and others don't? And of course you can't just poll every resident for their opinion, so you're stuck with relying on other signals...like local advertising and publications.
Appeals to authority are also of dubious value. There may be an "official" map somewhere, but if it doesn't reflect the day-to-day usage of the space, is it very useful? Prescriptivist maps generally enjoy about as much success as prescriptivist linguistics -- pretty to look at, but not what you want in your back pocket.
I feel like the issue here is that there simply isn't any data that definitively maps out where neighborhoods are. I have never been certain where neighborhood boundaries are in any city I've lived in. I remember when I lived in Chicago I looked around
for an official source and found one from the city... except the districts had no resemblance to what people were calling the neighborhoods. Meanwhile, real estate types always had very generous boundaries ("this isn't Cabrini Green, it's Lincoln Park" ok...).
Anyway, authoritative data could exist, but you'd have to collect it by survey and you'd have to get a lot of people to truthfully reply to the survey. No financial incentive exists to collect this data, apparently; wrong data sells condos (see the Cabrini Green quip above) and correct data gets you nothing except a map that more people agree with.
On some level, perhaps people read too much into neighborhoods. "I'm a good person because I live in neighborhood X." That is probably not an association worth making, but I think it exists because the reactions to wrong information in Google Maps apparently elicit so much vitriol.
My only real complaint with its accuracy is I recognize that Wicker Park extends north to the Bloomingdale Line, but otherwise, it's pretty good. It includes a lot of pocket neighborhoods like Palmer Square and the Wrigleyville portion of Lakeview, too.
Nextdoor.com maps out most neighborhood boundaries with some inputs from users. The boundaries are also allowed to “evolve” as time goes on and areas change.
For Chicago, specifically, the closest official equivalent is the 77 community areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_areas_in_Chicago), which definitely don't align with how residents see neighborhood boundaries. That's in part because the CAs were created decades ago by the U of C, and aren't really allowed to change so that longitudinal comparisons can be made using them.
Just speaks to how tricky the question really is. Cities have legally-defined boundaries for very good reasons while neighborhoods just...don't, so what is a mapmaker supposed to do?
In this case, there are official boundaries and they actually matter quite a bit for local politics. "East Cut" is a local neighborhood association which rebranded itself so it could expand its territory.
==On some level, perhaps people read too much into neighborhoods.==
I think this is part of the argument the article is making. People who buy real estate put an emphasis on the neighborhood, thus realtors have an incentive to create "new" neighborhoods. West Bucktown in Chicago is an example where realtors they didn't want renters or buyers to think they were in Humboldt Park so they made up a new neighborhood.
I recall a website that tried this for Boston. There was strong agreement on some neighborhood boundaries defined by particular streets. Others were literally all over the map.
Google's San Francisco office is in "East Cut". The idea of divorcing "Google" from "Locals" is utterly ridiculous in our neighbourhood. This is one of the few places I'd expect Maps to actually be up-to-date with changes on the ground.
San Francisco says it's a liberal city of immigrants, but unless you're born here and have lived here all your life somehow you're part of the evil "other" that is ruining the city and changing the names of neighborhoods.
Google has an office in Kirkland, where I live, and I understand some folks work on Google Maps. The data in and around Kirkland is not great. I realized that people that live and work in Kirkland would probably have no reason to discover how bad the directions are - who would dogfood driving directions to the local office?
For years, several dozen points of interest in downtown Seattle were transposed into downtown Kirkland. It totally broke routing - if you tried to map a bus route from Kirkland to the Seattle Federal Building, it would give you a route that dumped you in a residential neighborhood in Kirkland.
I live in neighborhood that was annexed by the City of Kirkland in 2011. 7 years later, Google's geo data still can't decide if it's part of Kirkland, part of Woodinville, or its own city altogether. Twitter identifies the neighborhood as its own city, which it never was, and definitely is not today.
In fairness, Google Maps did not invent these names itself. It merely collected by rôte and systematized, without any quality control or fact checking, names invented and published by other people.
This is a general problem with deriving stuff indiscriminately from information supplied by unidentified people.
Google does a lot of weird things with their maps, some of them aren't accidental. Here's my local anecdote:
I live in Thessaloniki, Macedonia (the region, not the country), Greece.
In our city there's a bus station called "Bus Station Macedonia".
Funded in 1952, long before the name conflict became a thing, it was named that way because it was servicing the region of Macedonia in Greece (it's an intercity bus station).
Recently, I noticed that Google maps names it "Bus Station Thessaloniki". I live in this city for well over 20 years and I have never, not once heard it called this way. If you ask for the "Bus Station Thessaloniki" locals will ask you what do you mean. But Google returns "Thessaloniki" to the query "Macedonia".
And it's a recent thing. I don't want to get into the details of the naming conflict, but the fact is that our NATO allies want to usher Macedonia (FYROM, the country) into NATO really fast, despite their nationalist and expansionist government, because of Russia. That's a reasonable move and I fully support it.
The problem arises when instead of actually intermediating to find a solution to the name issue, they just use their tools (like Google Maps) as a propaganda machine with complete disregard to our interests or even the fabric of reality (It's simply not named like that. Period.).
Of course there are a lot more machine-learning based artifacts on Google maps than political ones (for example Fiskhorn-->Fishkorn is probably the result of assuming misspelled queries as the ground truth) but keep in mind they can use this power in numerous, much more malicious ways (ie downgrading or upgrading neighborhoods, reducing visibility of businesses that they don't like etc).
> (for example Fiskhorn-->Fishkorn is probably the result of assuming misspelled queries as the ground truth
The article literally explains that the mispelling is due to Google relying on a 20 year old document lying somewhere around the internet with misspelt names.
"Macedonia (FYROM, the country) [...], despite their nationalist"
You say nationalist as if that's something wrong, even forbidden. Greece itself is being run by nationalist governments since decades (disregarding their political color). Austria is run nowadays by a nationalist government. Heck, the US is run by Trump, who is a nationalist.
In Los Angeles, Jeffrey Schneider, a longtime architect in the Silver Lake area, said he recently began calling the hill he lived on 'Silver Lake Heights' in ads for his rental apartment downstairs, partly as a joke. Last year, Silver Lake Heights also appeared on Google Maps.
Google asleep at the wheel again.
Developers wanting to create some tony new "neighborhood" as well as real estate agents attempting to shift the borders of desirable and undesirable neighborhoods are having a field day.
Doesn't seem unreasonable at all. Guy calls his apartments Silver Lake Heights, his tenants tell their visitors they live in Silver Lake Heights #4, visitors punch that in their phones but can't find it, get the street adress, and a couple enterprising 'local guides' suggest a place name.
The guy's apartment building isn't called Silver Lake Heights, what he did was start using the term "Silver Lake Heights" to describe an area previously known as "Silver Lake".
Realtors often drive the naming of new "neighborhoods", especially if it is lower class area that they want to gentrify. You know, branding.
I understand what you are saying, places are whatever people agree to call them, but I don't doubt that real estate agents, developers, etc are eager to have places called by new names when they are gentrifying the area.
Sure, but only insofar as any group of people living in a neighborhood likes to name it. Or do you still call the city by its original name, Yerba Buena? :)
Edit: Oh wait, that was a renaming too; just ask the Ohlone.
Again? They've been comatose for years. Look how they keep screwing up w/Youtube.
Everything is an algorithm problem to them and when something goes wrong it's always "oops, crazy technology blah blah algorithms". Which is 100% a cop out. Google has been resting on its laurels for a while now. Like Steam, they've shirked all responsibility for their service/platform. Must be nice to do f-all and still print money...
I'm in San Diego, and with the housing prices, I'm sure it's a constant search for areas that gentrifiers can afford. The last neighborhood to pop was Barrio Logan, which used to be a very rough neighborhood. Now it's yoga shops, art collectives, kombucha, and other stuff hipster yuppies need to have around them.
Sure, there's still graffiti and taco shops, but it's commissioned art and mango-chutney-glazed-pork-belly-kimchi tacos now.
In this article, the New York Times, with a bureau in the neighborhood recently renamed, considers what (or who) might function as the authoritative determination of place names for neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times themselves provide the authoritative source of neighborhoods in LA [1], through an extensive project incorporating local feedback and years of their employees' experience covering stories around LA county.
> named his new publishing start-up Fishkorn this year after seeing the name on Google Maps.
“It rolls off the tongue,” he said
And there you have it, the exact same process that gave rise to all toponyms. It's debatable if Google has a fault for unwittingly altering a random walk. Your older Fiskhorn is no more 'right' than my new Fishkorn, and in many ways worse. If consensus forms, by whatever means, that's what's right.
The question wasn't about how to determine all truths, only truths about what things are named.
For example, a bridge was constructed in central London named William Pitt bridge, named for the Prime Minister. But people didn't _call_ it "William Pitt Bridge", people called it "Blackfriars Bridge", because they'd always named that part of London "Blackfriars" and that's where the bridge was. Today the replacement bridge is just named "Blackfriars Bridge", nobody bothered writing "William Pitt" and being ignored.
It is still named Blackfriars Bridge to this day, even though the adjacent railway station, named Blackfriars, is actually in the form of a bridge, crossing the same river, if referring to _this_ bridge people call it "Blackfriars Railway Bridge".
But even though consensus is the appropriate tool for figuring out what these bridges are _called_ we certainly shouldn't use it to figure out when they were built - what they're made of - which country they're in and so on.
There is no inconsistency, just a missing set of quotes around "right" - I hold there is no right or wrong in this matter. I don't reject the right of the people living in the area to try to influence the concensus - they might have even a financial stake in imposing "Lakeview Heights" over "East End Projects". But do they have a fundamental right to self name?
Your older Fiskhorn is no more 'right' than my new Fishkorn
I'm not so sure.
"Fiskhorn" was probably named after a person or family. Like The Bronx in New York.
Changing it to "Fishkorn" erodes the neighborhood's history.
If you've lived most of your life in newer states, you may be used to made up place names. But in older cities/towns/states, place names have meaning. Often historic meanings. Knowing a little bit about the local history, you can read a story just by looking at a map.
Changing historic place names doesn't make the new names "right" just because the person who made the change thinks it's so.
Yeah but those "historic meanings" change all the time, and names shift because what's easy to pronounce wins over what's "correct". This is a digital equivalent of a very, very, very old process utterly intrinsic to human civilization.
There's an area in Kuala Lumpur that is called "Off Jalan Bangsar" in Google Maps (Jalan meaning street in Malay).
It's obvious that Google's machine learning algorithm took what is name of the nearest major street for a district name.
That seems reasonable to me. If locals had to refer to that general area and not an exact address might they use the phrase "Off Jalan Bandsar"? If so I think that is its correct name.
Most maps are deliberately inaccurate in subtle ways. You can't copyright facts, so cartographers use fictional places and deliberate errors to protect their work. If these features appear on another map, then it's reasonable to assume that they were plagiarised. Historically, cartographers have often created settlements or roads where none actually exist; inventing fictional names for districts or mis-spelling some place names may be a safer option in the age of GPS and autonomous cars.
There may be very small and subtle things added, omitted or changed, but it's not the case that "most maps" are completely inaccurate in subtle ways for this reason. Trap streets are just that: single streets, usually tiny ones, that are either completely fictitious or a mislabeled driveway or something. Not whole neighbourhoods being made up.
This is precisely why mapmakers introduce deliberate errors, so they can prove that a plagiarizer produced a copycat atlas not by recompiling from the basic facts, but rather used the compilation as a starting point.
Google maps tends to be better than most competing sources though. E.g. if you try to figure out the boundaries between Riverdale, Kingsbridge, Spuyten Duyvil, and Fieldston, Wikipedia just throws up its hands. But Google maps really gives the most sensible definitions down to the block, even though they’re highly irregular shapes.
Knowing all the commercial districts is a huge advantage for them. I’m betting they can see how often people who live in each block spend in each commercial district, as well as what all the buildings and shops are named.
Google maps's districts in Dublin are all over the place. Looking around the city centre at a certain magnification I can see names nobody ever uses, or that refer to individual buildings or tiny areas, shown as if they describe entire areas of the city. Maryland, Hybreasal, Cathal Brugha Barracks - roughly where I'd expect to see signs for The Coombe, Kilmainham, and Harold's Cross. If I zoom out, labels for Kilmainham and Harold's Cross appear. If I zoom in, Cathal Brugha Barracks changes from the "district" font to the font identifying a single landmark, and moves a couple of blocks to where the building actually is.
This must be one of the hard problems for computers, though it doesn't seem like it should be.
Google decided to rename the street that I live on (and get rid of my actual address) a few years ago. It took about 2 years for my correction to be approved.
It was really fun directing people "oh it's really easy to get here but don't use google maps".
I've been a proud member of the greater RAMBO community for years. It's a real and thriving community nestled between DUMBO and DOBRO and don't let anyone tell you different.
You've got a weirder situation in Cambridge, where there are 'official neighborhoods' which everybody ignores (except for maybe Cambridgeport) and instead divides the city into squares.
I asked for my city's government for a clearly defined line of where a neighborhood begins and ends, and they told me the local government did not name the neighborhoods but real estate did. Looks like google in this case is doing the same thing, hopefully their naming approach is not political or money driven as it is for real estate companies, that will extend the "borders" of a neighborhood to make properties price rise.
...The pattern proposed to replace the numerical avenues in the Richmond and Sunset was simple. The streets would run Arguello, Borca, Coronado, De Soto... to Zamorano for 26th Avenue. Some of the proposed names had historical significance; others were Spanish names that fit the pattern. After the 26th letter, the pattern would be Spanish saints, so that 27th Avenue would be San Antonio and 47th Avenue would be Santa Ynez. Unable to find a saint's name for K, Q, W or Z the Commission had two streets left over and recommended Alcatraz and La Playa to end the sequence.
After the proposal had its first reading before the Board of Supervisors on November 8, 1909, the western neighborhoods had an immediate hostile reaction. The more populated Richmond District took the lead and fiery orators were chosen to speak out at the Board meeting a week later. When the Board met on November 15, the speakers from the two western neighborhoods decried the idea of changing streets to these "unpronounceable" Spanish names. Orators got up and berated the Board for "selling out" to the Spanish we had so nobly defeated only a few years previously in the Philippines. The over-riding sentiment was that the accepting of these names would be a humiliation and henceforth the Richmond and Sunset would be mocked as "Spanish Town". Despite the vigorous oratory, the Board of Supervisors voted 12 to 5 to accept the recommended changes.
Outraged, the residents of the western avenues got organized to fight this imposition of Spanish names on their streets....
Yup. I see these "synthetic" place names popping up lately. Probably machine-learned from business listings near location, sometimes with bizarre results.
It's hard to say what makes a neighborhood nickname "real", but when I use Google to search for one of the "neighborhoods" near me and the first results is a forum discussion of "what the hell is <neighborhood> in Google maps, and why is it centered in swampland?"... then it's probably not a "real" area
Yeah, the 2 particular neighborhoods near me are ones that don't draw the bounds when you click on them in Google maps. Its a little annoying because it covers up map space that could be better utilized. But it would also be funny if a neighborhood name last used on streetcar timetables 100 years ago made a resurgence because Google maps happened to slurp up the right (or wrong) database of location names.
In San Diego, Google Maps uses the names of unremarkable apartment buildings and other multi-unit developments to label whole neighborhoods. Nobody uses those names but it's been like that for years. (Check out Hillcrest and University Heights by adjusting your zoom to the right level and those dumb names will pop up.)
I've noticed this before too. It has all the real names for these areas that people use, but with so much noise thrown in.
I'm happy to see my old stomping grounds of Golden Hill are regulated to about 6 blocks now in Google Maps. It's all Golden Heights and South Park now. "Golden Hill" encompassed everything now known as South Park at one time afaik, but it had a reputation, so they started calling part of it South Park and selling properties for a lot more.
This is especially funny in low google-activity/population areas, such as Finland, or even China.
I've been able to create/edit/remove cafes, restaurants, roads and businesses by just filling a simple change form. In a few minutes I receive an email that the change has gone through and anyone can see it live.
What a wonderful system. (:
...and this is without even going into the incompetent mess that is bilingual road/place names in Finland. 10 years since the first complaint and it's still not fixed.
It's not just Google (though automation, through skimping on the hard-to-automate activity of effective verification, has clearly accelerated it.) Mapmakers insert small errors into their maps as a sort of watermark. In one case, a made-up place name was added to a map of the Adirondacks region of New York. When it appeared later on a rival's map, it turned out that the name had been adopted when a guy built a house nearby, because it was on the first map.
I read an article about that a while ago. Apparently map makers were inserting fake towns into their maps to see if their maps had been wrongfully copied.
Similar things happen in unincorporated areas. I live out in the country, and I remember a year or two ago, a place-name appeared on Google Maps calling the area "Mary's Grove," which makes some kind of sense to me as a local, even though I've never heard anyone refer to the area as that, but it disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared after a while.
Now it says I live in "Warlick," and I have no clue where that name came from.
I've been working in offices a few blocks away from "The East Cut" and I never heard of it. Google's SF office is actually in the East Cut. I wonder how many Google employees there actually heard of it.
Also the area is mostly office buildings. The few residential buildings are mostly high end luxury apartments. I doubt most residents are even aware of the neighborhood nonprofit organization.
> Yet how Google arrives at its names in maps is often mysterious. The company declined to detail how some place names came about, though some appear to have resulted from mistakes by researchers, rebrandings by real estate agents — or just outright fiction.
So if they made a mistake they can't own up to it (like the Fiskhorn one)?
Because of the power of mind share, Google has the power to control borders.
The border between Israel and the West Bank is an odd one.
'Both sides' have their view of it.
But if 7 Billion people on planet earth grow up seeing one version of the border, it's what they will come to believe as 'true' and effectively support - particularly those in modern nations that might have influence.
China is aware of this and they control any maps their citizens will ever see.
"Of course all that ocean between Philippines and Vietnam belongs to China!" is what most Chinese citizens will assume, after all, they saw it on their maps growing up. While the rest of us will have seen a different map.
"
However, to remain neutral and to provide a practically useful service to a global community, we cannot delete base data to suit a particular legal jurisdiction.
"
Yes, but what I think OP is more so referring to is the idea that if an international organization tried to solve the dispute most would be in favor of what they have seen for the longest time. Which brings the question of how does Google decide which map it will show the rest of the world?
Thanks for the clarification I can see that is indeed the problem that can occur. I was speculating around the idea that none of these disputes are solved until those who have grown up scanning the world on Google maps are in power. In which case it would be both populism and to some degree world view.
It can be helpful to look at a map of the world with no borders drawn on it and remember that (apart from natural boundaries such as oceans) border lines are entirely arbitrary with no inherent meaning.
And also to look at past maps of the world when the borders looked quite different.
"meaning" is always socially assigned (or god's design for those you believe it).
But there is a huge difference between natural boundaries and human boundaries: one can be measured and objectively represented. You can measure heights and make a map of the earth with different colors for mountains, oceans etc. It could all be done by a machine without any human intervention, and represents useful physical differences on Earth.
On the other hand nobody could draw a map of countries' borders without talking with human societies, and no map can be objective or exact. In addition, those borders often are not even visible on the field, and in most border you can just cross and not even realize you are in another country (on roads you have border control, but most borders are just rivers, forests, fields, mountains, deserts without any remarkable feature).
This isn't unique to China, or to Israel and Palestine.
There's also Ukraine and Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Thailand, India and Pakistan, and a whole swathe of territorial claims in other places. Borders, especially when not naturally delineated by something like a river, are messy things.
At the very least Google should show it as "disputed" for anyone not involved in the conflict. Which is another can of worms of course, e.g. for Israel supporters viewing it from the US.
> China is aware of this and they control any maps their citizens will ever see.
Everyone is aware of it. Maps have always been political. Maps and borders are political creations. Why is it that whenever a controversial topic comes up, people always bring up china? Every HN thread that has a controversial topic, someone always sneaks in a reference to china?
> "Of course all that ocean between Philippines and Vietnam belongs to China!" is what most Chinese citizens will assume, after all, they saw it on their maps growing up. While the rest of us will have seen a different map.
You act like there are two maps. One china is pushing and another everyone else agrees to. China, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and every nation in ASEAN have their own maps.
The issue with maps has always existed. Whether it is current - crimea (russia/ukraine), sea of japan/east sea ( japan/korea ) or historical - hawaiians/inuit/nativesc vs european colonizers. Or the remnants of colonization like india/pakistan or artificial nations created by european colonizers in africa and the middle east which has created ethnic border issues.
Pretty much every nation today has map issues. Even within a nation there are map issues ( like the renaming of mount denali ).
It's not just borders. When you produce a map for the China market, you need to make certain islands prominent, and physically larger than they actually are, because South China Sea Politics. I can't find a link to cite, but this is well known among people in the mapping business.
Even their GPS coordinate system is different than the rest of the world. Most of the world has settled on WGS-84, but when you display GPS points on a map of China, you need to convert them to their own somewhat randomly-obfuscated coordinate system [1], and display all map data in that datum as well.
Because of these kind of special-snowflake rules, when you're making any kind of geographic software, you usually have to make two versions: One for China and one for everyone else. Not unlike dealing with the USA's insistence on using imperial measurement systems while most of the rest of the world has standardized on metric.
As an amusing aside, and whilst not wishing to introduce flammable politics into this discussion, there's a funny thing that goes on whenever the topic of the Scottish Independence debate arises in the media or on social media. It usually concerns the Scottish border between Scotland and England and usually heads along the lines of "rebuilding Hadrian's Wall" to keep us pesky Scots out of the rUK (or whatever the reason de-jour is) and is often repeated by unionists (and journalists) far south of the border who've likely never set foot in Scotland.
Little do they realise (or they do and are playing along with the usual lazy stereotypes and tropes about Scotland) that Hadrian's Wall doesn't track along the Scottish border and is in fact up to 70 miles south of the border (at the eastern end). So they unwittingly in their minds donated a decent chunk of the north east of England to Scotland come independence day. Well, thank you :)
So yes, people's ideas about maps and where borders lie are issues everywhere, not just in China.
> Little do they realise (or they do and are playing along with the usual lazy stereotypes and tropes about Scotland)
Why is it either of those? I think you're willfully taking "rebuild Hadrian's Wall" to have an extremely literal meaning that isn't intended by anyone saying it. Clearly they mean "build a wall between Scotland and rUK", not "follow the exact line of a 2000-year-old wall".
Trust me, if you've followed the Scottish Independence debate at all, there really are people who should know better that do actually think this way. They really do think Hadrian's Wall is the Scottish border.
Because China's often top of mind due to being in the news. Also, because China does many things (some good, many horrible) that suit them and not the West or Western principles. I'm curious to see why this bothers you and I hope you avoid falling into the "whattaboutism" trap.
Regarding parent comment: China's aggressive military base push in SCS and other waters is very worrying.
I encountered a gentleman on G+ who argued most stridently that "the British Isles" was an absolutely unacceptible term for the large archipelago lying to the northeast of mainland Europe.
He is, it happens, Irish.
(His view is also poorly supported, and worse argued.)
China is NOT merely acting like anyone else in regards to international territories.
China very aggressively uses every social, political and military means to change the maps in their favor and extend their political control. This ranges from building military bases by expanding islands in international waters and putting air bases on it and threatening others, to denying that they invaded Tibet, to getting foreigners fired for liking a tweet that might hint that Taiwan is independent.
The US regularly needs to put naval vessels & aircraft in harm's way to frequently reassert Freedom Of Navigation in international waters -- the potential harm is from China's false assertion that these are Chinese territorial waters. This needs to be done ONLY against China in this region -- no other players try to pull the same nonsense.
Please stop trying to act as if China is not an outlier in this regard. Their egregious and even bellicose behavior needs to be called out and halted before it gets more violent. This only serves to normalize and encourage China's egregious behavior.
Please don't take HN discussions into nationalistic flamewar. As the guidelines say, "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
(They also ask you not to use allcaps for emphasis, since that's basically yelling.)
And like clockwork, China isn't even singled out, isn't mentioned first, but instantly it's pointed out how there's really nothing particularly bad going on there, for over half a century. Even bending so far to pretend this is a "controversial subject", and as if most controversial subjects didn't mention China at all. The latter is an easily demonstrable falsehood, uttered in the interest of discussion hygiene. You can't make that shit up -- but I'm sure someone could crawl and visualize it one day. Though I guess one could simply read archives from the 1930s and get the same in more better language.
Other nations may have map issues, but China, in addition to concentration camps, really has map issues.
> As for the Marriott employee who “liked” the Twitter post by Friends of Tibet, Smith said disciplinary proceedings had been started. “Due to the mistake of an individual employee, our official [Twitter] account wrongly ‘liked’ the tweet supporting Tibet independence and misled the public. [We] have now suspended this employee and dismissal proceedings are under way,” he was quoted as saying.
Well, except that's not what happened. I couldn't find the one that was originally posted on HN, that article was much better, but this one has the tweet in question:
He didn't make an "error" even. He liked a positive tweet that thanked them for something he didn't understand and had no instructions about. Off with his head, and everybody do the pre-emptive obedience dance, go! When something like this walks the planet, when something like this feeds, then it's not the worst idea to mention it or things related in spirit to it at every occasion, especially whenever you meet new people or new crowds, as a litmus test.
Just like you might have a dinner party in the early 1930s and, then you mention Nazi violence, and a guest mentions that people have just different ideas about how to best go about internal politics. You smile, thank them for their comment, and never invite them again. You don't "leave politics out" when concerned with serious things, unless you're either putting all your stakes on the Nazis winning and erasing all records, like they would have done in Eastern Europe had they not lost the war, or simply aren't thinking that far. As I said, many historical archives are testament to that kinda being the norm, but culture of the present and last half century, uncountable movies and speeches, kind of seem to suggest it's not the norm we end up thinking fondly of in hindsight. They're not the people we wish we had the courage to be. They're the ones we're ashamed of and euphemize, instead of just mentioning their name and some kind of glow filling our hearts. Oh well.
Something else Google Maps does: it calls religious buildings "businesses" (if no-one has claimed them, then you'll see a "Claim this business" link when you click on them). This is a huge libel against those religions. Churches, mosques, synagogues, buddhist temples, all are "businesses" to Google.
It also calls government buildings businesses and other nonreligious nonprofits businesses. They're just using it as a generic way to say 'public building in our location database'.
I think, as noted in the article, that it seems Google sometimes uses names from advertisements as if they are canonical.
In my case, the city in question puts out a very specific, very legally defined map of each neighborhood, and has for more than a century. But real estate agents make up names for the neighborhoods, or fudge the boundaries to improve selling prices (thus commissions) and make their offerings more attractive.
About a year after a new neighborhood name is invented by a real estate agency, it starts showing up on Google maps. Then I have to deal with people complaining that our locations are mislabeled, because if it's on Google, it must be right.
It happens so often that I have an e-mail macro to respond to these people. And since the web site is very well respected by the locals, a couple of times a year I get requests from real estate agents, developers, and others, to change our maps to match their needs.
I got a particularly ridiculous one just this week saying that it's "our policy" (the real estate developer's) that maps should be drawn along a certain set of lines, and that we (the web site) are required to adhere to their policy.
I laughed.