I’ve been finding that it flat out doesn’t have certain streets that mapquest or yahoo do. I’ve even seen it lose information, where a friend of mine’s address which it once knew about it can no longer find.
Is this a side effect of street view or something? Has anyone else noticed this?
Does it vary from city to city? For example, Mapquest is worthless in Portland.
I haven’t noticed what you’re describing, but I have had 3 separate incidents involving 3 different states (FLA, GA, and VA) in the last couple of months where Google Maps has let me down by giving me incorrect directions. One told me to turn at the intersection of 2 roads that didn’t actually intersect. Another time as I was following the directions to a restaurant, I still had 3-4 more steps/turns to go, and noticed I was passing the restaurant…
WTF? I used to trust it almost completely, now I think I need independent verification from another map source.
This is why, increasingly, we rely on our cheapo GPS unit. It’s never failed us yet…
You know what? I’ve noticed this too. I thought it was just me. It used to be spot on every time, and lately it seems like it only gets you close to where you’re going. Also, it almost doesn’t work at all in Houston.
Wow, I’ve had that happen as well. I just assumed it was me not being able to read.
Maps seems to increasingly be the basis for other Google projects and marketing schemes, so they’d better pay attention if they are in fact getting worse.
I’m pretty sure that Google’s involvement with the GeoEye-1 satellite is a good indication that they realize that valid map data is very important to them. If their data has been getting worse lately, it might ironically be due to growing pains from getting that data online and increasing their independence from their existing map data provider (Tele Atlas, IIRC).
Be wary of using multiple online maps as “backups” in case one is wrong because a lot of them use the same GIS data sources (either Tele Atlas or NAVTEQ or both in some cases, depending upon geographical area) and thus are just as likely to give you bad directions if one of them does. When you get bad directions from one of these online mapping services, it is almost always due to bad data (the data is often up to 3 years old, keep that in mind as well), and not due to the mapping algorithms used.
In the cases I’m talking about though it’s not a matter of GPS data but Google thinking the streets flat out don’t exist.
I had a hell of a time trying to locate Doe Run Inn in Kentucky. It kept calling it a Super 8 and wouldn’t zoom in past the US view. It has a funny road name, so that might have had something to do with it.
If Google thinks the street doesn’t exist, it is almost certainly because the street doesn’t exist in the GIS street line map data they get from Tele Atlas. None of the sites really provide their own map data (though Google is beginning to move into this territory), they just licence it from the 2 major data providers (NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas) and put their own UIs on top of it.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter where the failure occurs, Google Maps has failed you, the only reason it helps to know where the failure actually comes from is to be on the lookout for other mapping services that use the same data provider (Google uses Tele Atlas in the US), as they are likely to be wrong in exactly the same way (unless they have newer/different versions of the street database installed).
I’m having the same problem, as my street doesn’t exist anymore, and hasn’t for quite a while. I had read something at the time that they had changed their data provider. I also did find something on their site about how to submit errors but never got around to it.
Here we go, not so bad after all: http://mapinsight.teleatlas.com
Yup, suddenly GMaps is unable to provide me with directions to several common locations I used to pull up there on a regular basis.
We printed out a Google map with directions to a hotel that we were staying on the way home from NYC a few week back, and didn’t discover until we were trying to find it that the map was totally wrong. The address and everything was entered correctly, but the map pin was nowhere near where the hotel actually was located. It wasn’t even on the right street (which, admittedly, I should have noticed when I printed the map).
In fact, it’s still wrong. Here’s the hotel: the Day’s Inn Newburgh West Point. Note the address, which is on Union Ave., i.e. NOT the street that the pin is on. The actual hotel location is three or four miles to the east of the pin location, next to I-84.
I know the Microsoft online sites aren’t usually the first ones folks go to for stuff like this, but give maps.live.com a try. In my area, it gives the best directions, has the most up-to-date maps, and even routes around traffic backups.
Here’s your Day’s Inn…
I moved into a brand new neighborhood a little over a year ago. When I first moved in, my address couldn’t be found. A few months later, it was found, but the satellite map still showed farm area. Then about 6 months ago, I noticed that I couldn’t see my house anymore on the google maps on my iPod touch, but I could see it on the regular web-based one. Shortly after that, it disappeared from the regular google maps, and has not returned since.
I haven’t been able to print a google map from Firefox for over a week. Works fine in Opera, so I have no idea what I’m doing wrong, if anything.
The maps are fine, and directions are fine. They now place the flag for a specific address on the road leading to the house, rather than on the house. This may be better for finding out how to get there, but worse for those who want to see the house itself when a road leads to several addresses.
As someone who spent years doing GIS programming I can assure you the maps are not (always) fine. They are rife with errors, especially in fast developing locations (like, say, San Diego or the Island Empire of CA prior to the housing crash), but also in cities with far less development. The road network is a living, breathing thing that changes all the time in ways you barely recognize (even within your own living area) and the map data these sites use is often up to 3 years out of date, and sometimes just wrong (due to human error, or automated mapping computer heuristics errors during the map lines generation phase) even when not out of date.
In fact, while this may have changed now that GIS is so widely used by end-user consumers, the map companies would sometimes even insert wrong data on purpose. Back when I was doing GIS work I’d occassionally see things like a road named “Homer Simpson Road” that I’d look up in Thomas Guide or some other paper map source and sure enough that wasn’t the real name of the road at all. When I asked the map data provider (Etak) about this, assuming it was some sort of easter egg or something, I was told they had put that (and other stuff) into the map database because they were afraid competitors would take their map data, reverse engineer the storage format, stuff it into a different format and then resell it. The improbably goofy names were in there as watermarks to detect this sort of thing. Needless to say, these watermarks impacted the ability of mapping software based on that data to actually generate useful directions in some cases since there was no actual Homer Simpson Road, etc.
Given good map data, the directions should always be “fine”, since that is the easy part, but you should never blindly trust any GIS system, none of them have perfect maps.