What Goes Wrong with Online Maps - NY Times
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Written By Reprise Media | June 28, 2005 | Share This
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The fact that they’re right most of the time is small consolation when you’re on your way to your cousin’s best friend’s sister’s ex-boyfriend’s cocktail party and you’ve got a significant other in the front seat screeching at you to ask for directions.
Since their inception, online mapping systems have been both a blessing and a curse to motorists looking to find their way without having a fold a map. The New York Times has an article that takes a look at the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of what happens when sites like MapQuest and Yahoo! Maps give you a bum steer.
Here’s a quick summary:
- Numbers game: Roughly 1 in 50 sets of computer-generated directions is wrong, according to the Association of American Geographers. With 4 out of 5 business trips happening by car, that makes for a high likelihood of something going wrong at the worst possible time
- Change happens: Construction, one-way streets, detours, and the like all make for inaccurate directions. Luckily, sites like Google Maps are making changes to keep up, adding support for one-way streets to their site’s offering not long ago
- Standardization? There is none. Most of the major sites draw their information from competing suppliers, each of whom handles their data differently using a process called geocoding to assign latitude and longitude coordinates to destinations
What’s a driver to do? Not much for now but wait for world to stop changing, something which seems unlikely. There’s always GPS or (gasp) asking someone. It’s hard to pull the whole machines are never going to measure up to humans argument on this one. If you’ve ever given directions to a stranger and then gotten that sinking feeling that they were completely wrong moments after they walked away then you know what I’m talking about.
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Re: Chris Elliot’s article this morning in the New York Times.
MapQuest is dedicated to helping people find places. We appreciate our 43.7 million users that choose our service each month. And we will continue to work hard to serve each and every one of those users to the best of our collective abilities.
MapQuest.com has some of the most reliable directions online today and we are constantly working with our third party data providers to update our directory, maps and directions information to ensure we can come close to being as accurate as possible.
Online users can help to ensure that we have the most up-to-date information available. By reporting errors on MapQuest (http://www.mapquest.com/features/main.adp?page=help_index), we can submit the information to our data partners to verify and correct. It is important to fill out the data forms online and be as descriptive as possible regarding the error. A written record is kept on file and also submitted to the data provider in charge of supplying that information.
Finally, if you are looking for a mapping/GPS solution, consider the MapQuest Find Me service available on Nextel’s GPS-enabled mobile phones. Learn more about MapQuest’s other wireless services by visiting: http://company.mapquest.com/mqws/1.html.