Residents are perplexed by Google Maps’ naming skills
Neighbourhood ID reshaped on a whim
For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.
The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.
“It’s degrading to the reputation of our area,” said Tad Bogdan, who has lived in the neighbourhood for 14 years. In a survey of 271 neighbours that he organized recently, he said, 90 per cent disliked the name.
The swift rebranding of the roughly 170-year-old district is just one example of how Google Maps has now become the primary arbiter of place names. With decisions made by a few Google cartographers, the identity of a city, town or neighbourhood can be reshaped, illustrating the outsize influence Silicon Valley increasingly has in the real world.
The Detroit neighbourhood now regularly called Fishkorn (pronounced FISH-korn), but previously known as Fiskhorn (pronounced FISK-horn)? That was because of Google Maps. Midtown South Central in Manhattan? That was also given life by Google Maps.
Yet how Google arrives at its names in maps is often mysterious. The company declined to detail how some place names came about, though some appear to have resulted from mistakes by researchers, rebrandings by real estate agents — or just outright fiction.
In Los Angeles, Jeffrey Schneider, a longtime architect in the Silver Lake area, said he recently began calling the hill he lived on Silver Lake Heights in ads for his rental apartment downstairs, partly as a joke. Last year, Silver Lake Heights also appeared on Google Maps.
“Now for every real estate listing in this neighbourhood, they refer to it,” he said. “You see a name like that on a map and you believe it.”
Before the internet era, neighbourhood names developed via word-of-mouth, newspaper articles and physical maps. But Google Maps, which debuted in 2005, is updated continuously and delivered to more than a billion people. Google also feeds map data to thousands of websites and apps.
In May, more than 63 per cent of people who accessed a map on a smartphone or tablet used Google Maps, according to comScore, which tracks web traffic.
Google said it created its maps from third-party data, public sources, satellites and users. People can submit changes, which are reviewed by Google employees. A Google spokesperson declined further comment.
Yet some submissions are ruled upon by people with little local knowledge of a place, such as contractors in India, said one former Google Maps employee. Other users with a history of accurate changes said their updates to maps take effect instantly.
Many of Google’s decisions have far-reaching consequences, with the maps driving increased traffic to quiet neighbourhoods and once almost provoking an international incident in 2010 after it misrepresented the boundary between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.