Dan: There are all sorts of errors in the maps used by the various GPS and database vendors. Navteq is one of the largest vendors of the data itself, while ESRI provides a lot of the geographical information system software. While following the I-5 pavement, I drive off the roadway of the I-5 in central California all the time -- if I am to believe the GPS system in my car. I understand that Navteq hires college students & others to exhaustively drive the entire roadway graph (this is the Euler tour problem, not the Hamiltonian tour problem) in order to update the GPS data & flag strange turn situations, etc. Even when the GPS has the roads correct, they often don't get the addresses along the roads correct -- sometimes they rely on an interpolation algorithm which can be wildly wrong. The store should be happy that the GPS data is wrong -- they don't have to worry about "smart bombs" finding them. :-) At 01:52 PM 11/13/2006, Daniel Asimov wrote:

In looking up the telephone number of a store I shop at, I typed its name & approx. location into Google and got the info I sought . . . plus a map that showed the wrong location (on the right street), off by about a mile.

Since then I've typed the address into MapQuest, and separately into the Microsoft map software on the store's own website -- and ALL of them show the wrong location on the right street.

(I called the store just to confirm that they were exactly where I thought they were, in case they had just moved or something. They were indeed where I thought.

So here's the problem -- How do I figure out who provides the evidently common database that is being used by Microsoft, Google and MapQuest so I can try to get them to correct the error?

(Contacting the three mapping software companies mentioned is, I quickly found, not going to help at all -- it's seemingly impossible to reach anyone with any chance of knowing how to reach the source of the problem.)

--Dan