Does anyone know a contact person inside Google Maps? Major map error not being addressed for St Helens, Tasmania

Gravy on 25/11/2019 - 15:44
Last edited 25/11/2019 - 15:44

Long shot, and perhaps a bit of an odd question for this forum but I'm wondering if anyone here has a contact that may be involved with Google Maps? I've been attempting to get in touch unsuccessfully with Google regarding a problem with the town of St Helens on the east coast of Tasmania (it's where they had the JJJ one night stand last year and also where I grew up back in the 70's - 80's).

Basically the town is one of the larger centres on the NE Coast of Tasmania (somewhere around 2000 people I think) but does not appear on Google maps until you zoom right in. A museum at the town even appears on the map before the town name is visible and Google maps also incorrectly names the town Saint Helens instead of the preferred name of "St Helens". Other surrounding villages that are much much smaller (sub 200 residents) appear more prominent on the map before St Helens.

I've tried to contact Google maps several times via their map error reporting page but it's not really set up to report errors of this type (seems to be designed to report street errors, not whole town issues) and I've had no response or change to the map over the last couple of years.

This would likely be affecting the tourism of the town to some degree as people use Google maps when planning holidays or whilst travelling and if the town is not being shown as a major centre I am sure many people would bypass it.

I've contacted Tourism Tasmania and the local council for the town but neither have had any luck either.

Any ideas or contacts within Google?

There's sure to be a "map of Tasmania" joke in here somewhere :)

Travel

Comments

  • crentist on 27/11/2019 - 14:47

    But why would anyone want to waste time St Helens when you can clearly see that thriving hubs like Upper Scamander and Pyengana (pop. 123) are so close by???

    • Gravy on 27/11/2019 - 15:26

      Pyengana does have some awesome cheese and a beer drinking pig at a pub in the paddock… recommended. I'm not sure about Upper Scamander's claim to fame, the upper of anything is usually better than the downer though yeah?

      • crentist on 27/11/2019 - 17:56

        I imagine a pub there would take any customers they can get

  • nickj on 27/11/2019 - 15:15
    +1

    Yeah, reporting errors to Google Maps is rather painful and seems to be ignored for ages. For example, I found an off-ramp (Allen St) from the Western Distributor near the Anzac Bridge in Sydney used to NEVER be used by Google Maps for navigation, even when it was clearly the best route (e.g. saving several minutes driving, 3 turns, and over a kilometre of driving). Ironically, this was in the very suburb where Google Australia are headquartered, which includes some Google Maps developers, in the very office where Google Maps was created! I first reported this on 10 May 2017, with full to & from details, and an explanation of what was happening and what should happen. Nothing happened. Eventually I reported it again in March 2018, assuming it must have been lost or something. And again, nothing happened. It's a route I drive semi-regularly, and so as a workaround I just learned to completely disregard Google Maps for that bit of the journey. Then recently, around August 2019, I noticed that it was finally fixed, and would use that exit when it made sense: yay! But it took over 2 years to fix an error that was clearly wrong, that had a clear & detailed factual report (two actually), that was reproducible on the web and in the app, and that was in the same suburb as their Australian HQ. So yeah, I learned that unfortunately Google Maps are not very responsive to fixing user-submitted errors, and that you should not hold your breath waiting for errors to be fixed. I just wish that user-editable open source options like Openstreetmap were viable alternatives.

    But the flip-side is that I once wrote a program that needed data from both Google Maps and alternatives (like UBD) and so it was effectively comparing their addresses & consistency over a 5 km by 5 km area in the inner west & city of Sydney. That found a number of errors on both sides (such as wrong street names, calling things a "road" instead of "street", wrong suburb, and so forth), and would manually fix/override those errors (just so I could get the program finished, and not have to wait for the mapping sites to fix them, because that might never happen). I sent the list of Google Maps errors to a developer contact from google, and it seemed to me most of those got fixed pretty quickly. So if you know the right people, it's fine. (That person left Google, which is why I couldn't send the subsequent off-ramp problem report to them to send on to the right person). But if you're reporting an error as part of the general mass deluge of reports, and resolving those must be like trying to drink from a fire hose, then it's easy to be ignored.

  • Gravy on 27/11/2019 - 15:28
    +1

    Maybe the staff were keeping that secret route for themselves. I can certainly imagine that reviewing all the street error submissions must take an army of staff though.

  • The mikky on 27/11/2019 - 17:27

    Is the problem only in google maps ? Do other map providers have the same problem.

    Could be an issue with feeds / data from the state government records ?

    • Gravy on 27/11/2019 - 17:35

      Google maps and google earth only as far as I can see. Bing, Apple maps, openstreetmaps, mapquest and others show it ok. Good thinking though.

  • Eeples on 02/12/2019 - 23:43

    A major ‘error’ would be if Tasmania was omitted.

    • Gravy on 04/12/2019 - 10:08

      Nah, that would just be a common error. :)

  • Gravy on 04/12/2019 - 10:14

    Interesting article about tourism and Google map errors, this one is about incorrect travel times to remote destinations and how the errors are causing tourists to avoid travel to those locations. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-14/outback-queensland-bu…

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