this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Niantic is a Google spinoff, and the data they generated for Ingress was used for Google Maps. I'm surprised they don't have a special deal with Google.
Google doesn't own most of their map data - they license it off other companies that have spent decades and billions of dollars collecting map data from all around the world.
So even if Google gives a project a "special deal" it's still not going to be free. Open Street Map, on the other hand, is totally free. And in some ways it's better than Google Maps — because it has millions of people contributing to the map. No commercial mapping company can come close to the level of detail OSM has. Compare these two screenshots — the Google map has so much less detail it's not even recognisable as the same place. Roads and major features are missing or drawn in the wrong place.
Google maps also has bad data for many places. My home address is the wrong street name. Google maps says it's "Drive", when it's "Court". It's been that way for 22 years apparently. Google is the only one that has it wrong. I've submitted 10 tickets to fix it, they keep denying the change.
Waze, Fixed it myself. OSM, did have it wrong about a year ago (before I moved in) was corrected when apparently a current OSM board member imported a cluster of addresses from the National Address Database.
Apple has it right. Bing maps has it right... Every other source has it right. Google maps just sucks.
What's worse is that many companies use google's dataset for address validation. Since my address doesn't "exist" according to the omniscient google, I'm just screwed when I enter my address on those sites.