> 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.

20 years ago I think the coverage area of Google Maps was still strictly limited to the US + UK. Like, the rest of the world map was empty.

But I worked on Google's geocoding (mapping names to locations) and reverse geocoding (mapping locations to names) systems 15 years ago, and encoding every local ruleset was absolutely not how it worked. Or even encoding any of them.

And what's described in the post are exactly the kinds of problems you'd have back then as well.

Some of these were upstream data quality issues, some were due to deep infrastructure problems that could not have been addressed without a complete rewrite, and others just basic recall/precision tradeoffs around the value of returning a result that doesn't match the query exactly.

And it didn’t last long. Simplified Chinese has creeped into Google Map Hong Kong for years.