There has seemed to be a lot of love and care for Google Maps lately. They just announced a new feature that lets anyone customize the location of a business, or even an address such as your own house.
All you have to do is perform a search for the address on Google Maps, and click on the marker that is pointing to the result. You should see a little bubble popup with details about that address/business, and then click the Edit link. After that you should be able to drag the marker around to the new location (pictured to the right).
So what about the people who are going to try and cheat the system by falsely marking locations? Google has already thought about that, and if you try to move the marker more than 200 meters it will be subjected to further review before appearing on Google Maps. They also provide a “move to original location” option so that people can always send the marker back to the original point in just a click.
The new service seems to be working really well, except for when editing some addresses I’ll receive an error saying “Because of technical restrictions, you cannot edit this location at this time.” Changing the location of businesses, however, works without any issues.
If people actually start using this maybe we’ll correctly know what side of the street an address is actually located on! Smart move Google.
Google Maps [via Google Maps Blog]
Nice. But most east/west addresses on Google Maps in the Town of Gilbert are off by more than 200 meters. Some are up to a mile off from where they really are.
Only works in a few countries so far, and Canada is not one of them.
Wow, a mile off. That is pretty crazy. I made a few changes that were more than 200 meters, and now I’m waiting to see how long it will take to reflect those changes.
That’s stupid. It’s not like the maps are all that different from country to country, so I don’t know why they couldn’t release this worldwide.
Not available in Australia too… :(
actually it does work… I just doesn’t work with certain addresses.
Works ok in the region of France I live in, 10 miles from Spain ans 5 miles from Andorra, more, it does work ok for the whole Spain and Andorra, as in France.
A hard work they’ve done here, along with google earth.