Worth noting for #GoogleMaps users... It has been clear to me for some time that #Google is using machine learning algorithms (sometimes called "AI") to adjust boundaries of geographic features. I assume they run an #ML model over satellite photos to do this. Here's a example of it failing, badly. The first picture attached is a Google Map of an urban creek in my town, with a street just north of it. Note how Google shows the creek not going anywhere near the street. The second picture is a topographic map of the same area. Notice how the creek ACTUALLY goes much farther north than Google depicts. For creeks and bodies of water I've noticed this most often happens where there is an adjacent #FloodPlain that the creek spills into on occasion. Clearly Google's algorithm is noticing water during flood conditions, or breaks in the tree line, and "learning" that the creek has moved. (In their defense, it is quite unusual that this urban creek passes directly under an office building parking deck, which probably also played a part. But why use ML to do this stuff when #topographic data exists?) #AIFails #AIFailures
Here's another example of #Google algorithmically (I presume) updating maps in ridiculous ways. I don't even need to show an A/B diagram for this one. Here they have picked up on the driveway of a house on the end of a cul-de-sac, and inexplicably decided to extend street THROUGH the house and far beyond it into the woods. Among the many things their algorithms don't understand is yes, there are sometimes wooded areas between houses that just don't have a street to access them. (Very common in tree-heavy #ATLanta where I live). They clearly have data on the property lines and where the houses are, how do they think this street is like this? #ML #BadAI #GoogleMaps #Enshittification
By the way this is not the only cul-de-sac in Atlanta that I have found where they have done this. Here is another, Windsor Forest Road. #GoogleMaps #AIfail #AIfails #MLfail
@krelnik umm useful observation, thanks for sharing, off to check stuff locally!!

@krelnik

What an insane decision. I have to use gmaps for work and even basic routing has started to not make sense.

@krelnik

I was curious about that one, but it looks like that might be coming from the county level GIS data which shows the straight line course.

https://qpublic.schneidercorp.com/Application.aspx?AppID=994&LayerID=20256&PageTypeID=1&PageID=8821&KeyValue=18%20196%2001%20001

qPublic - DeKalb County, GA - Map

Online access to maps, real estate data, tax information, and appraisal data.

@ThatPrilla I'm not familiar with that Schneider site or where they get their data. But the county has their own GIS site (also built on top of ArcGIS just like Schneider) and it looks like the attached map on the Dekalb site. Is it possible Schneider gets some of their data from Google?

@krelnik

Schnider GeoSpatial is a popular vendor for local governments. That map is part of their property search tool for looking up parcel information. The data is generally sourced from the municipality which purchased it.

They are borderline ubiquitous when it comes to looking up parcel information to the point that you can actually search for parcel data across large portions of the US.

If you search "County Name Property Search" you will probably land on a city/county web page that links to qPublic.net and a few other tools.

qPublic is singularly focused on parcel info.

I didn't track down the county streams layer (because im lazy), while browsing through basemaps options, I did see that a USGS basemap that had the stream following the southern edge of the parcel.

There were also some others with some even stranger courses.

@krelnik I just learned that anyone can edit roads on Google Maps, just like OpenStreetMaps (except changes aren’t immediately available; they go through a review process).
@com @krelnik I've been happily spending thousands of hours on improving #OSM but for Google to claim the copyright on the product of my free labor? Nah.
@menos @com I agree, I've done some input there, including fixing Google mis-placing streams. I just checked and OSM has my first example (the stream) wrong too. Just for diligence sake I'm gonna go drive out there and personally observe the location of the stream, and update it. But the topo data is very convincing, and I also know some people who have personally canoed under that parking deck. Stay tuned.
@com Yes I suspect one of the reasons they offer that correction feature is so they can feed those corrections back into their ML algorithms! Like Matt (@menos) elsewhere in this thread, I'd prefer to spend my time fixing OpenStreetMap and not giving free labor to Google.