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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] reaperducer|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] antoncohen|7 years ago|reply
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_neighborhoods_in_San_F...
[+] [-] larkeith|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] huebnerob|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mxfh|7 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/maps/place/South+of+Market,+San+Franc...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/South+Beach,+San+Francisco...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rincon+Hill,+San+Francisco...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+East+Cut,+San+Francisc...
[+] [-] _lqaf|7 years ago|reply
Put another way, you can call things whatever you want, but a marketing campaign does not obligate me to accept your silly branding nonsense.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dekhn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcoates|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] dilap|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldManRiver|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperberry|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] StudentStuff|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Bjartr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoSirRah|7 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/maps/search/alternate+rd/@38.5320081,...
Looks like they might have updated it since then.
[+] [-] protomyth|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lotyrin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ender7|7 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] jrockway|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NittLion78|7 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/1/viewer?msa=0&mid=13rPY3gTM...
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.
[+] [-] askafriend|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abrahamepton|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] flomo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moorhosj|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbhl|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RyJones|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JdeBP|7 years ago|reply
This is a general problem with deriving stuff indiscriminately from information supplied by unidentified people.
Wikipedia has a whole bunch of similar inventions, made up by people writing them into Wikipedia initially. (http://jdebp.info./FGA/legacy-encoding-has-no-definition.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...) And there is a fair amount of stuff that survived in Wikipedia for a long time, based solely upon a mention by other, highly credulous, WWW sites.
Google Web famously gives greater credence to some common spelling errors.
[+] [-] throwaway123124|7 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] dannyw|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cbnotfromthere|7 years ago|reply
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.
"and expansionist government"
FYROM has never ever even hinted they, a 2.1 million people tiny nation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Republic_o...), have any territorial request on Greece, an 11.2 million people nation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Greece). As Greece is part of both the EU and NATO, the idea of an expansionist FYROM is pure and simply ridiculous.
[+] [-] ilamont|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] maxerickson|7 years ago|reply
Whether the first someone is an official isn't that important.
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dickbasedregex|7 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] dsnuh|7 years ago|reply
Sure, there's still graffiti and taco shops, but it's commissioned art and mango-chutney-glazed-pork-belly-kimchi tacos now.
[+] [-] keane|7 years ago|reply
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.
[1] http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/
[+] [-] bumholio|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smallnamespace|7 years ago|reply
Seems a bit strange that you combined an absolute prescriptivist stance ('what's right') in support of an absolute descriptivist one.
It's not logically self-consistent: what if a consensus forms that your view here is wrong?
[+] [-] reaperducer|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kuba77|7 years ago|reply
https://goo.gl/maps/hBk464FEZ8u
[+] [-] jdietrich|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
[+] [-] Alex3917|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dmurray|7 years ago|reply
This must be one of the hard problems for computers, though it doesn't seem like it should be.
[+] [-] imsofuture|7 years ago|reply
It was really fun directing people "oh it's really easy to get here but don't use google maps".
[+] [-] CPLX|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Asooka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwmma|7 years ago|reply
https://bostonography.com/2012/crowdsourced-neighborhood-bou...
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.
[+] [-] ibdf|7 years ago|reply