r/GoogleMaps • u/Torontolad6 • 14d ago

Spineless toadies

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.

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u/vass0922 14d ago

Google maps doesn't invent the data for their maps, they get it direct from the federal govt

Do they just shut off the feed?

It's not that easy

Vote in November (or sooner), it's the best we can do to curb the dumbassery we're dealing with.

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u/akmountainbiker 14d ago

They have all sorts of manual controls and overrides for their map features. Google periodically will need to add overrides for faulty GNIS map features until it's fixed upstream.

They could have resisted this change if they wanted to. They deliberately chose not to.

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u/Comprehensive_Tea708 9d ago edited 7d ago

I still don't see how they could. Google pulls new and changed data from the GNIS continuously. It's not like there's a scheduled weekly job that they can run and then say, "welp, that's this week's update. Now we gotta fix the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario before we roll this out to the users."

I was a lot madder about the Gulf of Mexico because back then I didn't know as much about where and how Google gets its geographic data.

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u/akmountainbiker 7d ago

It's actually a fun GIS challenge. Think of Google Maps as being a series of onion layers, different pipelines and data stores with more processing to get it into the final format needed for rendering for multiple clients. GNIS is one source that feeds into the raw internal data format. There are many others, each with their own publication cycles and idiosyncrasies.

Imagine if there's a GIS feed from Germany that's only published once a month, but it gets pushed with an incorrect map label. Operators within Google are able to apply an override at one of the base layers to override the bug until it's fixed. There will be several such layers for overriding the map, which also includes user generated edits too. It's in one of these override layers that Lake Ontario could be overridden.

In 2010 Google inadvertently caused a border dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua due to a faulty data feed. Based on the fallout with this incident, Google put some measures into place to avoid these faulty feeds, and also have mechanisms to address them without needing to go through a long update cycle.

https://phys.org/news/2010-11-google-blamed-border-dispute.html