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other thoughts

Google lamely lost me

[Monday: 3.2 miles; today: 3.2 miles]

I listed something on Facebook marketplace and we got quite a few responses. So I gave my address out to a few people.

One guy responded that the address was showing me living in South Carolina… which is not true.

So I tried my own address in Google Maps and sure enough it didn’t land on me.

Google insists on calling our street Mt Airey Church Rd. I have notified them multiple times that it isn’t right.

I guess they finally pulled whatever temporary patch they had stuck on it to keep it working ok. Now it no longer works.

The interesting part is that I know how address databases work. There is an official list of all of the addresses in the areas covered by the US Postal Service. And there is a website you can go to which will show you what your real address format is supposed to be.

Here is a screen shot using the Google approved address for my house:

That little line of red text says that the information is not in their database.

Here is what the USPS says is our correct address:

The USPS approved address is the one we use. But it doesn’t work in Google Maps. 🙁

If any old post-card mailing service has to use the USPS address database, it is sad that Google Maps can’t figure out how to do it.

I would be willing to bet that there is some department in the big Alphabet company, which owns Google, where they already have the official USPS database and use it for sending out paychecks or dividend checks or whatever they send out. Somebody needs to share that stuff with the map department.

3 replies on “Google lamely lost me”

At the UF pre-season women’s soccer game two weeks ago I met a guy who moved to Gainesville, FL from Starkville. I mentioned that my brother lives on Mt. Ariery Church Rd. He said he knows exactly where that’s at. “Out past the Walmart.”

Airey vs. Airery (the latter being a bit tricky for those who are not familiar).

Try Bing? DuckDuckGo?

It amazes me what Google maps has accomplished/accumulated, especially for street view in USA and across the globe. How some places are blurred out, and people, and license plates. I live on a river and you can “street view” from the _river_. Why on earth did they bother to do that? (But it’s pretty cool.)

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