Google Makes Sharing Plus Codes Easier in a Push To Simplify Addressing System Globally (techcrunch.com) 51
Two years ago, Google open-sourced Plus Codes, a digital addressing system to help billions of people navigate to places that don't have clear addresses. The company said this week it is making it easier for anyone with an Android device to share its rendition of an address -- a six-digit alphanumeric code. From a report: Google Maps users on Android can now tap the blue dot that represents their current location to view and share their unique six-digit coordinate with friends. Anyone with the code can look it up on Google Maps or Google Search to get the precise location of the destination. The codes look like this: G6G4+CJ Delhi, India. Google says it divides the geographical surface of the world into tiled areas and attributes a unique six-letter code and the name of the city and country to each of them. More than 2 billion people on the planet either don't have an address or have an address that isn't easy to locate. This challenge is more prevalent in developed markets such as India where a street address could often be as long as a paragraph, and where people often rely on nearby landmarks to navigate their way.
G6G4+CJ appears to be Leominster, Massachusetts (Score:1)
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G6G4+CJ appears many times in the map of the world. You must include the qualifier "Delhi, India" to tell the map software which location to look up the G6G4+CJ code. Google also has 4 digit codes for each location which is about 100x100km. If it is showing up as Leominster MA then your computer IP address apparently GEO locates to somewhere in that 100x100km region and the map is giving you the 'closest G6G4+CJ' location.
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Total 10 digits - like area code + phone number (Score:4, Interesting)
Apparently you're in Massachusetts?
In total, it's a 10 digit code, like a US phone number. (US meaning the leading 1 is assumed).
Also like a US phone number, it's made up of an area code + a specific number. Further like a US phone number, if you use just the local part without the area code, you get the one in YOUR area code.
The one in Dehli can be expressed in either or two ways:
G6G4+CJ, Delhi India
7JWVG6G4+CJ
7JWV is Delhi.
For anyone wondering, the plus code covers an area 14 meters * 14 meters. So for example my house has three codes, depending in which part of the house you're in. (It's a Texas-size house).
Re:G6G4+CJ appears to be Leominster, Massachusetts (Score:5, Insightful)
6 or 7 alphanumeric characters aren't enough to pinpoint a location on earth with sufficient accuracy for locating an address. Here's an example using a perfectly good, numeric, easy to understand, non-obfuscated, already open standard that has been in use for ages: latitude-longitude:
43,-98 is four digits, and puts you vaguely in a rectangle that is about 50 miles by 60. With minimal geographic knowledge, anyone who interprets the numbers would know it's somewhere about halfway from the equator to the north pole, and about 1/4 of the way around the world from the prime meridian, or with a little more savvy you can instantly tell that it's going to be somewhere in midwestern North America.
43.7,-98.0 with six digits, you have an area about 5 miles per side. That's sufficient if you want to indicate the location of something like a city or an island.
43.71,-98.02 with eight digits, you get about a couple hundred meters of accuracy. Maybe enough to give the general location of a neighborhood.
43.714,-98.025 10 digits, gets you to within about 30-40 meters. Maybe you could report the location of your house with that, but it may be a little off.
43.7148,-98.0254 12 digits (maybe 13 if your longitude is greater) and you have located any point on earth to within about 5 meters. And you didn't have to record it as part of a "city, country" string.
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That's only because you didn't read the summary.
https://www.google.com/maps/pl... [google.com]
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Wait..what? (Score:2, Informative)
According to the summary, you specify a six-digit code PLUS the city, country? I was under the impression that was an anti-goal: https://github.com/google/open... [github.com]
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You can use either the full 10-character code, which includes the four-character area code, or use the six-character + city, or use just the six-character if the area can be assumed. If you and I work together in Dallas, I can tell you to meet me at the fireworks field at F9J55B. You'll know it's the local one in Dallas, not thr location in Ecuador. Given no context, use either the 10-character code or 6 characters plus the area name.
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Makes sense now. I'll bring the fireworks to Ecuador. Meet you there?
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Foue digit phone numbers (Score:2)
Yep. When I was a kid, and later when I lived in a small town, people have their phone numbers as four digits. You already knew the area code and exchange - it's the same for everyone in town / in the neighborhood. Everybody at my elementary school was 303-979-xxxx. So you just said "my number is 3620".
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There are also 4 digit codes for an 'area code' that can be given with the 6 digit code instead of the city/country:
https://9to5google.com/2018/03... [9to5google.com]
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One wonders what rural residents use if "city" is a requirement.
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They use the extended plus code format
We already have ways of doing this. (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet they've made it harder on mobile for people to see the latitude and longitude which are far more useful when trying to communicate where you are.
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How is it harder to tell someone to meet you at "G6G4+CJ" vs telling someone to meet you at "28.526041, 77.206557" the former is far bloody easier to write, both on a mobile phone and on a computer. And that's if you're nice with formatting and don't tell people to include the DMS symbols: 2831'33.8"N 7712'23.6"E
There's nothing more useful about an even longer string of numbers, especially since it's trivial to convert between the two.
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Well, let's see. Call 911 and tell them you're at G6G4+CJ and see what they say. I can guarantee they won't know what to do with that.
Now give them a Latitude/longitude pair and they'll have no problem.
Also try giving G6G4+CJ to anyone who doesn't use Google maps, and same problem.
This is proprietary way of doing something that's already handled well by an open standard. I don't even care if it's ever do slightly "better", as long as it's not universal it fails completely for any critical application.
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How is it harder to tell someone to meet you at "G6G4+CJ" vs telling someone to meet you at "28.526041, 77.206557"
Oh, it's not.
But lacking access to a Google device or the Google reference database, I have no fucking clue what the fuck you're talking about if you tell me G6G4+CJ.
Whereas I can take a latitude and longitude and easily apply it to a paper map, a GPS device, an inertial navigation system or even just my general knowledge of how lat & long work and get pretty fucking close just by dead reckoning.
But no, you want life to be easy for you, not for the person you're talking to.
What's wrong with the coordinates? (Score:1)
What's wrong with the, you know, using longitude and latitude [wikipedia.org]?
We've been using that for centuries...
Two numbers, independent of name-changes and other politics, and shifting borders, instead of a number plus city and country.
For example, where is Bakhchisarai, Google? Which country is that, in your opinion — and are you even allowed to tell Russians, that the city is in Ukraine, even if occupied by Russia at the moment [techcrunch.com]?
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Latitude and longitude are signed numbers with different ranges. The order in which they are used matters - if reversed, they will represent a different location.
To express a location to roughly 10 meter accuracy (five decimal places), latitude and longitude require between 15 and 20 text characters ("0.39122,9.45225" to "-43.95134,-176.55053"). This is around double the length of a typical telephone number.
Latitude and longitude express a point location, and there is no universally accepted way to provide
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Detailed latitude and longitude are better written in minutes and seconds, which takes even more characters, to your point, but is much easier read to copy by hand without transcription errors, much like a comma every three numbers helps.
Minutes and seconds are also handy units for navigation. 1 minute of latitude (or longitude at the equator) is 1 nautical mile (or a bit less than 2 km), which is why knots is a handy unit of speed. 1 second of latitude is about 100 feet (or 30m), again a handy conversion
Re: What's wrong with the coordinates? (Score:2)
If you're willing to sacrifice precision for tiny, isolated polar settlements, you can neatly pack most locations into a 40-bit value with 8 base32 digits.
Rounding up to 70N (Norilsk, Russia) and down to 54S (Punta Arenas, Argentina), there are only 124 whole degrees between the northernmost & southernmost "real" cities on Earth... and most of the remainder live within 32km of another dozen or two points.
So... you first divide the earth into two compression schemes... the 125-degree band between PA
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"G6G4+CJ" is easier to write on a phone than "28.526041, 77.206557"
There's a much better way (Score:5, Informative)
Re: There's a much better way (Score:1)
A open source version of thia shouls be trivial to create though.
It might cause the pearl clutchers to melt into tears, though. Which is of course a feature!
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Re:There's a much better way (Score:4, Insightful)
IP addresses are much better. It's extremely well thought-out. DNS requires a much larger infrastructure, is insecure, and is otherwise subject to capitalistic tendencies.
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The problem with What 3 Words is that they are English words, and most of the world does not speak or more importantly read/write English.
Many Chinese and Japanese people I have met can read the Latin alphabet well enough to use a Plus Code, but couldn't read whole words or at least would struggle. And some of the words they selected are quite difficult for learners.
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It's a good thing that W3W is available in different languages [what3words.com].
It doesn't say if the words are direct translations or a different re-hashing in each language. It seems like translations would have a lot of corner cases where a language doesn't have a direct translation for an English word. But they must have figured something out.
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That doesn't really help if I need to tell the taxi driver where to go and we don't speak the same language.
three words only (Score:1)
what three words?
https://what3words.com/ [what3words.com]
"alphabitch" google is once again applying too much power where it is not needed, too late, and for their own gain, i think.
sorry if this has been mentioned before, do not have time to read all comments.
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Yet another one. Stop it. We don't need it! (Score:1)
Classic adresses carry a lot of useful information for a reason.
And if you need a GPS location you are using a computer/phone anyway, so just send a goddamn *link!*
(It's only a matter of time, before the WhatWG goes doubleplusfull retard, and invents "web(web)links" though. So what do I know?)
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Obviously someone who has never travelled much of anywhere. Addresses are great, if you live somewhere that uses them in a reasonable manner. If you're travelling, that may not be a reasonable assumption that addresses
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Classic adresses carry a lot of useful information for a reason.
Wow. You didn't even make it to the end of the first fucking sentence in the summary, and don't even know how to spell addresses as well.
Congratulations a new low. Another completely ignorant post brought to you by or resident moron BAReFO0t.
Macrovision again? (Score:2)
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Don't worry, they're saying it gets better if you also learn the second code, but I just wish I still had Betamax.
I have a delivery ... (Score:2)
What about UTM coordinates? (Score:3)
To read these comments, you'd think that lat/long and plus codes are the only games in town.
In all the responses here, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned UTM coordinates. (Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system). In many ways, quite similar to plus codes, although not as compact to write. I won't describe them in detail, since wikipedia does a pretty good job.
UTM codes have a long, well established history. They've not been around for centuries like lat/long, but for long enough to have proved very useful in everyday use -- e.g. on topo maps.
When I first heard of plus codes, my first reaction was that they were just reinventing the UTM wheel -- although I must admit I'd prefer plus codes over UTM for everyday use because they are more compact -- which is largely because alphanumeric rather than largely numeric.
I like that plus codes have sub-fields for area-code/location, so the full code can be used to be globally unambiguous, or the more compact location field can be used alone as a shorthand in cases where the area is known implicitly -- e.g. for short-distance driving directions. I'm less fond of the existence of the alternate form, where the location portion is used in combination with a city name. I am sure that will be a source of confusion (as it obviously already has been in the comments on this forum!), and was a very bad idea IMO.
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UTM is just (longitude) zone with northing and easting values in meters. Those are offset from points at the equator (for the northern hemisphere, the southern is similar, but to keep things positive, the southern hemisphere is offset from a mythical point south of the south pole). And those values are usually quite large. Northings vary between 0 and about ten million (it's about 10,000 km between the equator and the pole). Eastings vary between about 0 and a million (the center of the zone is 500,000)
MGRS - solved long ago (Score:2)
The US Military (probably others) used (uses?) the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) which is remarkably similar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
without having duplicate addresses or city names (what character set would you like those names in?)
12 characters get you 10m resolution globally, 14 get you 1m resolution, looking like: 4QFJ 1234 6789
and, like Google's solution, leaving off the first four characters is reasonable in a local area.