by da_chicken | 2025-04-25 01:28:50+00:00
So, I've been in a position where I have helped do address verification for a school district. In some states, schools have to verify where students live because property taxes often pay for schools, so knowing where your students live determines your tax funding (and for missing children laws). I've worked with thousands of addresses now, and seen a lot of uncommon situations.

Google Maps is really bad when streets are even slightly unusual. That's even with North American address conventions, which are extremely regular by comparison to many nations.

For example, if you have both a North and a South version of a road, and the address numbering for North and South versions overlaps -- say, North and South begin at a county midline road and North increases going north and South increases going south -- it will irregularly put a pin on the wrong road or wrong segment of road.

Similarly, it will be confused if you have River Rd and West River Rd. And it can be confused when Oak Ln becomes Oak Ct or insist that Oak Ct is really Oak Ln even when the road name actually changes.

It also gets very confused by roads that have two names. For example if there's a county line road, the east county might call it "Franklin Rd" while the west county calls it "E County Line Rd." And in that case the east side of the road have one set of addresses, and the west have another set. Worse, the address numbers often don't align. Except that's not what Google screws up that often. Instead, Google will sometimes insist that one or the other road doesn't exist at all. It will say that 123 E County Line Rd is actually 123 Franklin Rd, and then it will put a pin where 123 would be on Franklin Rd if that road didn't begin its address numbering at 3000.

Sometimes it insists the city is incorrect, too. If your address is "123 Miller Rd, New London" and New London is a tiny unincorporated town near Portland, Google might translate the name to "123 Miller Rd, Portland." Sometimes even when there's a street the next county over with an address "123 Miller Rd, Portland". In this case if you enter the Portland address, it will point you to the address actually in Portland, and if you put in the New London address, it will show you the New London address... but it will still correct your New London address to Portland.

If you have a road with breaks in it, such as for a river without a bridge, it will occasionally just... put a pin at the end of one segment of the road and not find the address on the correct segment on the far side of the break.

About the only things that's really consistent is: If you zoom in and the pin is in the middle of the road, then Google Maps probably can't find the address. On the other hand, if the pin is off the road, then it's probably exactly on the structure based on the local or municipal authority and their GIS data. In that case, Google found the address on the GIS data they got from that municipality.

And you might say, "Oh, but those are really easily confusing things! It's entirely understandable." And, maybe that's true. But USPS's ZIP code finder still knows the addresses well enough to both find and correct them for you, and ArcGIS interfaces also seem to be able to find things much more easily. Google Maps was groundbreaking 20 years ago. But it really hasn't kept pace. The only thing that seems to confuse the other sites is new construction. At the very least, I wish Google Maps would be more clear when it's guessing rather than when it's found an exact match.

All that is to say, yes, we did use Google Maps to help find addresses. But when things looked even a little weird, we assumed that Google Maps was wrong. And it usually was wrong in those cases. And what it got wrong was sometimes really, really wrong.