Thursday, September 13, 2007

Google Map can't locate Mountain View (Google Headquarters)


Today I needed to go to Mountain View from my office in San Francisco downtown.
I called my friend, asked his address and typed following address in Google Map's driving direction section:

Start Address: 795 Folsom St San Francisco
End Address: 900 Highland Way, Mountain View, Ca 94041

Surprisingly, Google Map located end address of mountain view in somewhere in San Bernardino near Los Angles, around 400 mile away from its actual location.


Surprised with these results I tried same address with Yahoo Maps, Yahoo found Mountain View correctly but didn't gave me direction till Highland way. At end I tried same query with Ask.com and it told me that it could not find that street.

I called my friend again to confirm his address and found out I mis-heard the street name first time. After correcting the name every site it correctly.

I was most surprised with the google result, even though I had given the wrong street name, I had given everything else correctly even mountain view zip code. In the Google's result there were no indication that something is wrong with street name or address.




Till now I used to think that Google has done wonderful job with human language interpretation technology to understand users queries in its search technologies, but today's experience will force me to reconsider my decision.
What is ironic with this experiance is that Google has its headquarters in Mountain View, Ca

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