Google map plan

Discovery of Google Maps Anomaly

joseph.ergo@proton.me | Portfolio | Resume PDF | Linked-In | +212 713-617-633

Available immediately for full/part-time remote roles

Introduction

While scraping Google Maps for job leads, I extracted business coordinates from GMB URLs when exact locations weren’t available.

This is a GMB URL example where the coordinates values are after the @:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/CallOnDoc/@46.423669,-129.9427085,3z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x864e9ff614faaaf5:0xbec976c7d6f5b955!8m2!3d46.423669!4d-129.9427086!16s%2Fg%2F11gmdf9b8y?authuser=0&hl=en&entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTEyMy4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
After plotting the data, I noticed some points fell in the ocean—raising questions about how relevant these businesses are…

Here is an example of such business:
CallOnDoc, a business with more than 16K ratings.

Seeing a major business like CallOnDoc with a location error on Google Maps raised red flags.
I re-scraped a large data sample—4,986,146 entries—and found 133,292 points placed in the ocean.
This pattern, dubbed “the distribution of geocoding errors” by a community member, highlights systemic data flaws where invalid addresses default to placeholder coordinates.

Here is the graph separately: Link

The data set can be found: Link

Check out this amazing article by Google Maps Mania

Further investigation

Some members suggest that [46.423669, -129.9427086] could be the [0, 0] (The Null island) of the US, the same way Switzerland have it own anchor.

The [46.423669, -129.9427086] point is to the left of the USA, can it be the center?

To answer this, I looked for the 4 most extreme points of the US territories using lists from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_the_United_States

I made an "area" out of the values [71, -14, 144, -64], and turns out, that [46.423669, -129.9427086] is in the center, at least horizontally.
If you need the graph separately: Link

We might be able to draw quick conclusions:

Quick stats