

No, You're Not Crazy--The Cities on Google Maps Keep Changing - newson_db
http://www.41latitude.com/post/528663247/cities-change-on-google-maps-for-the-eighth-time

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gheaslip
This is just a guess, but could they be using some algorithm based on
analytics data (say, which cities are zoomed in on and searched for the most
and/or A/B testing) to determine which cities should show up on zoomed-out
maps? They can't show every town and city at once without things getting very
cluttered, and it seem very Google-like to relentlessly optimize based on user
data.

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hugh3
Or else they're just going off some combination of population size and
avoiding clutter/overlap.

I opened up google maps to stare at it for a while, and one thing that jumped
out at me is that I think they might be using different algorithms for
different countries. Using what comes up as the default zoom for me (four
notches from the bottom, enough to make the USA about 600 pixels wide) I see
that the US has cities marked relatively sparsely, whereas they're much denser
in Mexico.

Scrolling down to Australia it looks like the algorithm is far from perfect;
it shows all the state and territory capitals except Adelaide, which is an odd
omission.

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randombit
Recently some cities and certain addresses have been actually moving, as well.
There were a couple of months where it decided my house was actually about 5
miles from where it is, which made giving directions more complicated. (I had
to specifically tell workmen and visitors to make sure they used Yahoo Maps or
some other map source to avoid misdirections).

More amusing, for the last couple of weeks Google Maps has placed Randolph Vt
right in the middle of Lake Champlain.

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warfangle
For a while, it had the pin for The Bronx smack dab in the middle of
Brooklyn...

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memetichazard
I can see that some of the cities are popping in and out - in the top example,
Highland park by the lake in the upper right, and Lasalle at the intersection
of 39 and 80, but it's really hard to see them with the labels moving around.
Might have been easier for him to make his point if he could add in some red
circles around the affected towns.

Actual, maybe the cities are being hidden due to label placement? That is,
there's not enough room to display all the cities with their labels, so rather
than have them overlap, the algorithm chooses to hide the city if there's no
room to place it.

I bet if you zoom in on a missing city it'll show up.

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jeffreyg
never put much thought into it, but I've assumed that they changed based on
whether I was logged into my google account at the time, since I noticed that
the non-notable town i'm from usually shows up when zoomed out pretty far, to
put it amongst labels of much more populated places.

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cosmicray
when I look at my home address (rather rural) some local place names (way too
small to be called a city) do indeed appear and vanish. I've attributed it to
some kind of rotation algorithm. Some of these place names are so obscure,
I've barely heard of them.

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Doug312
That's really weird.

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teilo
Seriously? I suppose if one has a lot of time to waste, he can obsess about
Google's label-placement algorithm, and how it seems to change from time-to-
time. If one is really obsessed, he can even take screenshots every day, and
put up a web page about it, expecting others to be equally obsessed. Or, one
might consider getting out once in a while.

~~~
newson_db
Great things are often created out of obsession--e.g., Google's search engine,
the iPad, the light bulb.

