Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Fun with Google maps… and finding home


I moved into my new house a couple of weeks ago.  A brand new house… just finished…  I am the second finished home on the block, and I suspect those others are living mostly in California, only visiting on weekends…  Its not lonely, there is a park across the street, where other neighbors walk their dogs, and children come to play… and the there are the construction workers… building the other houses on the block… framers, drywall guys, painters, electricians and stucco crews…

A new house is a wonderful thing… all is fresh and clean, except when the wind blows in the construction debris from the continuing work… but even that is not that bad…

There is one problem… a challenge…  The house is hard to find… not in the conventional sense of "take Lake Meade Parkway north from Boulder Highway then turn left on Sunset."  If you know where it is it is easy to find,  but if you don’t know where it is and if you try to use Google maps or Bing pr similar GPS systems like delivery people and the local garbage service, there are issues… 

Bing (brought to you by your friends at Microsoft) does not know my neighborhood (yet?) exists, including the park across the street which has been there for two years… according to Microsoft I live in the middle of a blank spot in the desert…   If you force the issue it will send you to a different, disconnected portion of East Sunset Rd… about a mile away.

Similarly, Google via an address search (1056 E. Sunset Road) will take you the same older but disconnected portion of Sunset but 2 blocks closer to the my house than Bing, but still a mile off… but then the fun begins… If you choose to try to force Google to the correct location, it knows about my portion of E Sunset road, and the park, and the presence of homes nearby (but satellite view shows a vacant lot…  they will update that image eventually)… and if you ask Google “what is here” it will identify the spot as 1084 E Sunset…  (which is about 6 houses off… not bad Google…) and if you search for 1084 E Sunset I will give you pretty good directions…   but if instead you try 1086 E. Sunset (the next house beyond) we are back at Sunset and Pabco…   Clearly Google only knows one or two addressed on upper East Sunset.   Mapquest gets it right… but is clunky… and doesn’t want to show me where my house is but instead where local businesses are…   Mapquest Satellite view is at least two years old, and doesn’t even show the lake…

So when Best Buy tries to deliver my new washer and dryer, they go to the wrong place, and call, confused, lost…  The same with West Elm…  and the garbage service… who has missed my trash pick-up three times now… then I call (and call and call) and it gets picked up three days later. 

I think I know why… Google (and presumably Bing) populates its maps via a “Geographic Information Service” (GIS) who build their databases on City and County databases which are primarily built on tax information and similar government filings…   and my neighbor at 1084 was the first resident of the street, and has been there long enough for the closing documents and property transfer to make it into the various databases, and a recent Google map update…   My house is too new so hasn’t appeared on the tax rolls and databases…  This of course does not explain the difference between Google and Bing… but of course no one can explain Bing…


So for now, I have to tell delivery people to enter a false address into their GPS, then find my house from there…   Isn’t modern technology wonderful…

No comments:

Post a Comment