Mapping house names with Google

I’ve had a success! I shouldn’t have needed to have this success but I did, and I have.

Since we moved to our current house 8 years ago today we have had two different kinds of experience from delivery drivers.

1. We order something – a person comes in a van and delivers it.
2. We order something – a person in a van goes to the wrong part of our village, takes a photo of a dirt track, uploads it to a delivery company’s systems and we spend ages trying to get our goods delivered to the right place.

It has taken some effort to track the root cause of this route confusion, but it turns out to be a flaw in Google. Many delivery drivers use Google to navigate (so do I). Google doesn’t map house names in the UK. They only handle house numbers, so the pin degrades to the centre of the post code, hence the pictures of a dirt track.

There is a way around this, as I have eventually found out. The Google official line is

You can’t add your address without house number by yourself, only Google employees can do it; could you please share your address and the coordinates of your house where your address will be added. 

Abdullah AM, Google Community

1. Raise a question on the google maps community support forum
2. Wait for a volunteer to respond. I’m grateful to Abdullah AM, an IT professional and Social Worker for picking up my question.
3. Wait for a techie to contact you with a Google form asking for the details
4. Provide the details
5. Wait again (in my case four weeks)
6. Magic happens

I have know idea what commercial drivers there are for this behaviour, given the correct mapping data are available from Geoplace.

So what’s the moral of this tale – well, for me, its that a failure to correctly manage master data, or a dependence on an organisation that fails to manage its master data to a quality that meets your needs, leads to a bad reputation because you fail to meet reasonable expectations.

Thank you Abdullah AM – there is a chance my deliveries will arrive to my house.