So just accidentally entered the wrong address in Google Maps on mobile.
Put an asterisk after the street number and it showed a bunch of "dummy" roads.
Anyone else?
Dummy Roads on Google Maps?
[Deactivated] on 13/02/2016 - 16:18
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It actually directs to none existent roads too
they are contour lines
Or a ring road
Good find! You've accidentally stumbled across someone's test data that they made in the production system.
I found some other test data that made it into production. Try:
- "ZZZ"
- "xxxxxx"It is a very naughty practice for anyone from the IT development teams to modify/update data in production environments.
The most likely culprits are users who have the access privileges to modify/create in production. In my experience these are usually a concerned manager from the business area or their sub-ordinate who was loaned out during User Acceptance Testing.
Could they also be 'fingerprints' and 'trap streets' to prevent other companies from copying Google's map data? E.g stealing and copying information and rolling their own maps without google's authorisation.
A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features (such as nonexistent towns or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.[1]
I'm guessing the addition of dummy roads may be confusing to robots and scrapers which try and download google map data and attempt to replicate them.
Maybe its just Google trying to copy Apple
Apple Maps = Phantom locations :)😷
Paper Towns
If you zoom in far enough on Environa, NSW (on the border with the ACT, near Queanbeyan) you'll see ghost streets on Google Maps. The town was never built but it has a postcode.
cool. great map poster on wikipedia too
So autocomplete works?