There are plenty of third party iPhone apps dedicated specifically to finding restaurants and stores near your current location, but the built-in “Maps” app still does a plenty serviceable job – most of the time, anyway. Tapping directly into Google Maps, the app allows you to type in something like “restaurant” and get a map showing the locations of surrounding eateries. But the other afternoon, upon finding myself in a strange neighborhood and needing gas, lunch, and a store, the Maps app managed to fail me in increasingly comical increments. And it all culminated with a restaurant which, according to Google, is known asQuizBLoWs.I knew I was in trouble when I used the Maps app to determine whether a restaurant I’d spotted on the way in was within walking distance of my location. I’d guessed it was no more than about a quarter to a half a mile, so should I hoof it or should I be lazy and drive? The Maps app was all too happy to show me how to walk there: go north for a mile, cross the railroad tracks, go west for a half a mile, come back south across the railroad tracks, turn back toward my original destination and walk down Interstate 5 for awhile, and 2.4 miles of hoofing it later I’d be at the restaurant which was indeed about a quarter mile away:
Remembering I needed to stop for gas anyway, I drove. After lunch, the fun began. “I need to find a convenience store,” I thought. So I typed “store” into the Maps app and, sure enough, it found me several. From 7-Eleven to Starbucks, the app cheerfully showed me every kind of “store” it could come up with. Then I noticed it had also suggested a place which it referred to as QuizBLoWS. That alone made me curious enough to drive by the place, which turned out to be a standard fare Quiznos restaurant. Wow. Talk about pissing someone off, whether it be a rogue Google employee or some random hacker with a grudge who managed to hack Google Maps just a bit. Best I can tell this is the only Quiznos location to have been labeled with this comically derogative moniker, and it’s repeatable simply by typing “QuizBLoWs” into the Maps app on your iPhone or on maps.google.com on your computer. You have to wonder if those guys running that particular store even know what hit them. How many passersby are not eating there because it’s labeled that way in Maps? Then again, the only reason I did drive by the place was because of the way it was labeled. Of course I didn’t eat there, either.
Oh, and as far as finding gas? Typing “gas” into the Maps app, I was helpfully steered toward one name-brand gas station only to arrive and see that there was another name brand gas station on the other corner of the intersection. You have to wonder how one made it into Google Maps under “gas” and the other didn’t. On the other hand, I may have simply been visiting the worst-mapped neighborhood on the entire Google Maps planet. It happens. Google Maps is still the best online mapping service out there in my experience (anyone remember the comically awful days of having to rely on Mapquest?), but experiences like this only serve to show the challenges faced by manually attempting to map the globe and the kinds of things which can be omitted, mis-mapped, or comically mislabeled in the process.
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