Comments on: The mysterious data mines of Argleton-on-Google

By: David Calder

David Calder — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:18:57 +0000

Well this makes a lot of sense. I’ve been using Google Maps on my iPhone to find guest houses and hostels in towns in Spain only to find they’re in completely different places or don’t exist at all. This is really quite annoying when you’re travelling by bicycle and the prospect of another 20 miles doesn’t seem so appealing. As such I’ve given up on Google Maps altogether as I just can’t trust the data any more.

By: Chris Fleming

Chris Fleming — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:34:30 +0000

A friend who works for Tom Tom has confirmed that it is in the “current” Tele Atlas data, so I think this town does come from Tele Atlas rather than from Google.

By: David

David — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:02:44 +0000

Interestingly, although the town isn’t marked in Multimap, if you search for Argleton in Multimap, you are taken to the same spot on the map as you are in Google Maps, and you can ask for directions to and from Argleton (it will even list it as a destination in the list of directions). This is not the case for TomTom’s web journey planner, however.

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:37:46 +0000

Or it could be OCRed council planning applications, which I believe are public domain, as suggested on the Free The Postcode discussion page (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Free_The_Postcode#Legal)? Interesting, this wonderful suggestion for a source of data comes under the heading “Is Data Mining the Web Legal?” – Google obviously think so.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:15:05 +0000

I’m rather appalled that just because this has been listed in Google, there are now tons of “listings” on the web for this fictional town.

By: Suprageography » Blog Archive » Google Maps – Nearly Alright

Suprageography » Blog Archive » Google Maps – Nearly Alright — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:08:45 +0000

[...] been some discussion about the large number of small-scale mistakes present in Google Maps – there were always a [...]

By: Abigail Brady

Abigail Brady — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:20:11 +0000

I’ve been discovering that even things that are labelled correctly often don’t come up properly in searches. When attending a family wedding in the summer I discovered what happens when you search for “Church Street, Leatherhead” in Google Maps. That is to say, it takes you to Church Street in Effingham, rather than the Church Street in Leatherhead. This sort of thing used to work, I’m sure.

By: Shaun McDonald

Shaun McDonald — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:57 +0000

I’ve noticed a similar issue with schools around Edinburgh where many of the are simply plain wrong or out of date. One that I went to over 11 years ago was merged with the school at the other end of the playing fields about 6 years ago, and is on the Google map on the wrong side of the road. Needless to say, I’ve given up on them.

By: Mike Nolan

Mike Nolan — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:55:16 +0000

I agree – OCR error from possibly printed sources – out of copyright gazetteer would be my guess. A few miles north of Argleton/Aughton is Mawdesky/Mawdesley.