

Ever Notice How Often the Cities on Google Maps Change? - j053003
http://www.41latitude.com/post/375079692/cities-change-google-maps

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thibaut_barrere
It may be a side effect of scaling. That's just an assumption.

The algorithm used to determine what will be displayed and to ensure that
names will not overlap may also not be deterministic, or not completely.

Meta-balls kind of computations can typically generate a different output
based on where you start to aggregate stuff.

Given the need to handle this at a very large scale, one could imagine that
different machines are doing their map/reduce thingy on their own, and that
the first responding would be taken into account first, etc.

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randomwalker
My guess would be that they are experimenting with the algorithm used to
determine which cities are prominent enough to display on the map. As for why
it changes so often, perhaps they are not changing the algorithm itself but
just fiddling with the parameters in an automated fashion for A/B testing?

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rivo
Maybe they're not even experimenting. Maybe when you change something in one
place (e.g. adding a landmark), it affects the layout of a whole lot of other
places, too.

~~~
newson_db
Except for that there are no landmarks shown on any of the examples. Looking
at the maps, nothing is changing except for the cities and the placement of
the highway labels.

The adding and switching of the different cities does seem completely
arbitrary.

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andyking
The language of the place names seems fairly arbitrary too.

I've noticed them switch a few times from English to Welsh and back in Wales -
Caerdydd instead of Cardiff, Pen-y-bont for Bridgend. Something similar
happened to Ireland for a few weeks last year, too. For some reason, Gaelic
seems to be excluded from this; I haven't seen Steòrnabhagh yet!

The centring of the map has changed, too - when they first put up the map of
the UK, zooming in from the default location would bring you right into the
centre of my town. Now it's in the Irish Sea.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Do you speak Gaelic?

This is something I don't understand, living as I do in Wales. Stornoway, say,
is the name of the place? If that is the name then for a Gaelic person the
name should be "Stornoway" (or I'd accept a transliteration) and not something
that is pronounced differently, no?

When I speak to a Russian I don't change my name to Па́вел, it's my name. I
can understand to some extent people in another country applying a different
name, or applying a different pronounciation of the same word (eg Paris), but
I don't understand why you'd translate a name.

/rant

~~~
cracki
don't overthink it. in germany, the state is called Bayern, even though it's
"Bavaria" in english.

same thing with my current town: it's called "Aachen" in german, but "aix-la-
chapelle" in english or "aken" in dutch.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Bayern vs Bavaria is not translation. Presumably it's a historic
transliteration that has mutated over time.

Aachen and Aken are clearly related by transliteration, fine, same name
written using different sounds. Aix-la-Chapelle again is not a translation.

Round here a place gets called Bridgend, that's the original name. Close to
100% of the population speak English. Those that don't tend not to speak Welsh
either. The name gets translated as Pen-y-bont (end of bridge) as if it were
simply a description not a name. Then all the modern vocab is taken from
English and most speakers in the South use a mix including English language
words; yet for some reason nearly all the names have to be translated? It gets
worse as most of the natives can't pronounce the Welsh version of their own
town names correctly.

/rantingmyassoffboyoisntit

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davidw
For a while, there were a lot of 'ditches' marked on the terrain map of the
US. That was some sort of glitch, though, I'm sure.

Also, I'm curious to see how long it takes them to update this:

[http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Via+Monte+...](http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Via+Monte+Venda,+3,+35143+Padova+Padua,+Veneto,+Italy&ll=45.420018,11.872975&spn=0.003008,0.008224&t=h&z=18)

That overpass is now complete and operational, as of a month or two ago.

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wedesoft
Many map vendors put small mistakes in their maps to make proving theft easy.
Changing the layout maybe prevents others from obtaining a consistent set of
map tiles by slowly downloading them.

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brfox
Notice how the labels never overlap? This includes the highway labels. I bet
they just randomly start placing labels and once you have a few of them on the
map, then there is no way to have the same labels all the time... especially
if the edges of the view are slightly different than when it was accessed
before.

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csytan
Could be that the most accessed (zoomed in) cities are shown in the overview
map.

