Google Maps is an invariably fantastic service that has slowly become a de facto platform for easy geographic representation of data. Lots of sites use the service, APIs and tools provided to visualise, inform and project information onto maps.

In Hellas (Greece), Google has — with the help of Teleatlas, the primary data provider for street-level map data — done a great job, gradually improving on the accuracy of its geocoder and the quality of the data, especially for Athens. We use Google Maps for our AthensBook and ThessBook ‘smart’ guides and many of our web-based tools are built with the service in mind. We also make heavy use of Google Earth for our Geo|Ads analytics and reporting, creating KML overlays for our customers.

In late 2008, however, things started going bad for Google Maps: first Google messed up the naming of the streets in Hellenic; from ‘Οδός’ and ‘Λεωφόρος’ (road/street and avenue) streets started appearing as ‘Πάροδος’ (sideroad/bystreet), or, much worse ‘Ακτή’ (coast), ‘Πλατεία’ (square) among others. Things clearly broke for many Google Maps users depending on the Google geocoder and there was some noise on Google Groups, blogs, fora etc.

While Google was slow to respond, it gradually fixed (most of) the issues. Then in late Spring 2009 things broke again, but for another reason. Instead of using the contemporary hellenic spelling for many of the neighbourhoods, suburbs and municipalities of greater Athens, Google started using the Katharévousa versions of those places, an older, more formal version of hellenic that has more in common with the archaic versions of the language and that was abolished from everyday/schools/government use in 1981. Χαλάνδρι (Chalandri) suddenly became Χαλάνδριον (but the roman version remained Chalandri), Νέο Ψυχικό (Neo Psychico) became Νέον Ψυχικόν etc. These changes again broke some scripts and generally made Google Maps harder to use for people in Athens. I reported this to the Google Maps support forum in late May 2009, but there hasn’t been any change to the way places are named in Google’s database.

Ye Olde Google Maps remains a fantastic tool for users worldwide, but issues like these severely affect its usability in Hellas.