In the logistics industry the commonly held wisdom is that there really isn't any accepted system for "how street addresses work". Different countries have completely different systems, and even within a country there are often many different conventions.

The thing that really matters in delivery is whether the address on the consignment has enough information for an operator to complete the next leg. By the time an item makes it to the region where the delivery address is situated, the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.

Even if the city in the article has a well defined system, it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system. This is the problem that geocoding schemes (what3words, etc) are meant to solve, creating a single system that applies globally. But like many "rational" systems that attempt to replace entrenched practices, they struggle to gain traction.

Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”

https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system

That's not the original ethos of Google: organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. I don't know about now but twenty years ago Google almost certainly thought it worthwhile to encode the rules of every regional system. Add that to Larry and Sergey's "healthy disregard for the impossible" I'm willing to bet that twenty years ago Google had almost certainly made it feasible to do just that: encode the rules of every regional system.

I believe that there is no accepted global system for "how street addresses work", but there has to be a better solution then a business owner reaching out to a friend's cousin to try to get a serious problem fixed.

If my fixes had been published in the promised 24 hours then this blog post would not have been written but after two weeks this is the best idea I could come up with.

I think it is practical for Google Maps to understand the systems used in most major cities and then use this knowledge to reduce the number of errors.

I also think it is possible for the feedback system to work better. It does work sometimes, but it is slow and opaque and unreliable. It's even worse for bike directions.

You're making the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Making sure buildings are near the street listed, in the right range of numbers, is a system that works in most regions and should be encoded and used for checking data.

For a practical example here, check out Mumbai, India in Google Maps and look at addresses of various businesses there, most of which amount to "Building Soandso on Road X near Landmark Suchandsuch in neighborhood Y" (ans often written in a non-standardized way, on top of that). To compensate, delivery apps there have you visually put a pin on a map as a standard part of checkout flows.

> it’s probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system

Does it have to encode them all? Why not start out with one then at least Google Maps is a little better for some.

Besides that, how many systems could there be? There are only something like 10,000 cities on the planet. That sounds like the kind of task Google is built to handle.

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.

This is literally true when talking about the entire planet, but this is Vancouver.

There are many geocoding systems that do just fine with the considerable range of addressing schemes in the developed world.

Something very weird is going on here, like Google finding a cheaper method for geocoding that is probabilistic and yields a level of errors they are ok with.

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system

I disagree, it's a requirement of being global. If you can't be global, don't. Meanwhile they have hundreds of thousands of engineers in their employ around the world, they have the scale to be correct.

I know this isn't what you said, but the idea that a small scrappy team of developers in one corner of the world can develop a system that works at all for the entire planet while dealing with the real world should be possible is just nonsensical. There's no reason Google can't be correct other than the fact it's unsexy to management that solving the problem involves hiring people who speak nearly every language on the planet and can connect and comply with enough governments around the world to get things right. Somehow that's not less surprising than sending cars everywhere to take photos of everyone's front doors without their consent.

Google Maps may not be able to understand every regional system but it _does_ understand the system in Vancouver. It then, apparently, makes it too easy for exceptions to this system to get encoded in their database and makes it too hard to fix those errors when they are noticed.

I worked on a global consumer mapping app once. Among that team, the idea that address schemes were too inconsistent to be useful was also conventional wisdom.

> even within a country there are often many different conventions

Indeed... sometimes USPS even makes up their own "vanity city" names that don't exist. Or mailing addresses might use a different city name than where the house is physically located because of where the post office is physically located.

> and even within a country there are often many different conventions.

You know who knows this? The tax authority.

> the local operators usually have enough understanding of the local system to get the item to its destination.

Large freight does not work this way. I worked on top of a ski resort for a while. We had a mapped address right where the ski left let out instead of the base of the hill. In the summer you could drive up to it on an ATV easily and a pickup truck if it hadn't recently rained. Somehow a semi truck driver for a freight company got this address and mapped a route to it. We were quite surprised to see the 53' box truck driving up the side of the ski hill.

> it's probably not feasible for a global product like Google Maps to understand and encode every regional system.

The information is encoded elsewhere and it's a bummer there is no incentive to make it as open and widely available as is possible. Although if delivery can rely only on partial information to "complete the next leg" then why can't address lookup do precisely the same thing?