Google maps - one word makes that much difference?

[Margaret Ornsby]

Tripped across this quirk this morning. Could present a problem for people getting accurate driving directions...

I have to go to a funeral today and wasn't sure how to get to the chapel at the cemetery. I went to the maps, typed in the name of the chapel and the name of the cemetery. (renowden chapel springvale botanical cemetery)
Maps took me in the opposite direction to the cricket grounds in the city.

I decided to investigate and see if figure out what the algo's doing.

If I take off the first word "renowden", then maps can put me in the right spot. The thing is, there are quite a few chapels at this cemetery, so it would be nice to know which one.

Curious if it would do the same thing in the old maps, I typed in the same thing on maps classic. Same error, but this gave me a better clue as to why it chose the cricket ground.
Under the listing in the old maps is an extract of text:
"Tony's funeral will be held on Monday, 18/11/13 at 11:45am at the Boyd Chapel, Springvsle Botanical Cemetery, 600 Princes Highway, Springvale." <nobr></nobr>

Funky eh? I'm fascinated this little sentence has so much influence over the maps algo.

I searched the cricket grounds website and cannot find the word "renowden" on the site and G site search didn't show it either. Thought it might have come from the embedded twitter feed - searched the twit-stream - no joy; nothing in Facebook stream. Searched G for the phrase - no joy.

If I do a search for just the name of the chapel, the organic results show at least one full page of results matching the cemetery name (which I didn't search for) and some of the entries have the name "renowden" bold. So clearly one algo in Google knows about the chapel.

Really weird.

 

[chadkimball]

so where did the text come from?

"Tony's funeral will be held on Monday, 18/11/13 at 11:45am at the Boyd Chapel, Springvsle Botanical Cemetery, 600 Princes Highway, Springvale."

<nobr></nobr>
​

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Million dollar question...

 

[chadkimball]

Million dollar question...

maybe you checked this, but is it from your email or google plus or some non public source? Could have been that it displayed only for you and not for the general public

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Hi Chad, yes, no difference...

 

[Chris McCreery]

Look at how many instances there are of "11:45 am at the Boyd Chapel, Springvale Botanical Cemetery, 600 Princes Highway, Springvale" in search. I'm guessing the obituary service pushing that out to many different sites basically creating tons of citations.

https://www.google.ca/search?client...CNsfyyAHbl4DoCA&ved=0CCQQBSgA&biw=320&bih=460


Chris McCreery

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Yah, okay.
Still puzzled...
Search for "boyd chapel springvale botanical cemetery" gets 19,400 odd results, with the top 3 coming from the herald sun.
Search for "renowden chapel springvale botanical cemetery" gets 17,700 odd results, with the top 12 coming from the herald sun. (and the 13th is this forum!LOL)

The herald sun is our big newspaper. Makes sense it would syndicate all over the place, esp tributes.

I'm still puzzled that not only has Google Maps somehow decided the cricket club is the renowden chapel

Looking on maps, maps has a boyd chapel (typing into the search box it drops down as an option), but doesn't recognise renowden, wilson, or blair. Turns out boyd is the only one Maps seems to know of. But there's still something funky with renowden... if I ask maps for the wilson or blair and put in the cemetery, it still takes me to the cemetery. renowden goes to the cricket club.

Ugh. spent enough time on this, thanks for the discussion guys. somehow I don't think we'll get to the end of this. Chalk it up to another quirk. All the more reason to be incredibly diligent with researching and verifying for clients.