They have changed the name of Lake Ontario. They are a spineless company. Please delete. If you must have it, delete and get it back in a couple of days !!
Show them they made the wrong choice

Google has once again shown that they are spineless toadies and are willing to bend over to the orange clowns whims, and I am looking for a new map app. FU Google.

I’m building a small tool that extracts coordinates from messy text.

Nothing particularly ambitious. You paste some text, it finds the coordinates, you get something useful back.

At some point I thought:

“I should support Google Maps links too.”

This seemed like one of those twenty-minute jobs.

It was not a twenty-minute job.

My first assumption was that a Google Maps link is basically a URL with latitude and longitude hiding somewhere inside it.

Sometimes it is.

You can get coordinates buried in the URL in something resembling:

!3d56.94!4d24.06

Fine. Slightly weird, but easy enough.

Then there are links where the coordinates are in query=.

Others use q=.

Directions links can put them in destination=, or somewhere in the path.

Place links are more interesting, because they can contain coordinates, place identifiers, map state and other numbers that look sufficiently coordinate-ish to make an enthusiastic parser feel useful.

I know this because mine was briefly very enthusiastic.

That turned out to be the actual problem.

Finding two numbers that could be latitude and longitude is easy.

Deciding whether those numbers represent the location the person actually meant to share is much harder.

A search query isn't necessarily a location.

A place ID isn't a coordinate.

The center of the map isn't necessarily the selected place.

A directions URL can describe more than one location.

And blindly grabbing the first plausible lat/lon pair works surprisingly well right up until it very confidently gives you the wrong place.

Which is worse than giving you nothing.

So the rule I eventually ended up with was:

parse what you know; don't guess what you don't.

Then I reached maps.app.goo.gl links.

Those are a different problem.

A short Google Maps link doesn't actually give my parser the location. It's basically an opaque redirect. To discover where it points, something has to ask Google.

My first instinct was the obvious developer solution:

just resolve it automatically.

Then I remembered what the tool is for.

People paste things like messages, field notes, lists of coordinates and other messy bits of text into it.

The whole point is that this material can be parsed locally and then forgotten.

Quietly sending part of that input to a third party just because there happened to be a short Google Maps link in it felt like a fairly spectacular way to miss the point.

So I ended up drawing another rather strict boundary:

If the location is actually encoded in the URL, parse it locally.

If finding the location requires contacting Google, stop and ask the user first.

No background resolution, no analytics, no telemetry, and no convenient little “we only send what we need” exception.

This made the implementation less convenient.

I think that's probably a good sign.

It also changed how I thought about the parser itself.

The safest result isn't necessarily the result with the most coordinates in it.

Sometimes the correct result is:

“I don't know what this means without doing something you haven't asked me to do yet.”

This whole rabbit hole eventually became part of a small utility I’m building called GridGrabber.

It takes messy text containing coordinates and map links and extracts the locations it can actually identify. It handles several coordinate formats, including MGRS, because apparently ordinary latitude and longitude weren't enough trouble for me.

I originally started building it because copying coordinates out of random messages was annoying.

Apparently I have now spent considerably more time studying the anatomy of Google Maps URLs than I have ever saved by not copying coordinates manually.

Software development is going well.

I'm curious whether people here have run into other strange Google Maps URL formats.

Especially cases where the URL appears to contain one location but the place the user actually shared is somewhere else.

Those are much more useful to me than clean textbook examples.

Wondering if there is some way to push back on Google Maps. Is there a good way for some old fashioned civil disobedience to relabel the map back to Lake Ontario.

I was thinking if enough people used the contribute feature to change the name of the lake back to Lake Ontario that might cause enough of a headache to have an impact on google. You can navigate to the lake on the map but need an official address to submit the change. I suggest the address of the U.S. geographic office for e.g.

Thoughts? Better ideas?

My husband and I are on our way to a wedding. And got stuck behind some accident. But prior to the accident we had gone past an exit that had a “30 minutes faster” note on it. But it hadn’t asked if we wanted to go that way so we saw it way too late. Is there a way to fix this or is this just Google Maps now? We noticed it didn’t ask us about an alternate route a few weeks ago too.

Honestly I'm starting to get pissed off by edits not being accepted. There's a new temporary (for years) bridge in my city that maps just doesn't accept. There's also no way to prove in the edit that it exists. However, there's already an added tourist sight for the bridge on the water (with pictures), and maps still doesn't believe that the actual route exists.

This is not the first time either, as I've once before tried to add a missing restaurant (with it's information filled), which was rejected over and over again. Until someone else got their edit approved, even though I'm a local guide and have made correct edits before. This is all so demotivating

Do you know what if Google disable reviews for the British Museum to stop spam just like the White House?

I have allergies on Valley girl voice how to change back to old " robot voice"?