Google's New 'Plus Codes' Are An Open Source, Global Alternative To Street Addresses (9to5google.com)

Google has developed a "simple and consistent addressing system that works across India and globally." Called "Plus Codes," the location-based digital addressing system is designed for people with addresses that are not easily located through conventional descriptors like street names or house numbers. That's half of the world's urban population, according to a World Bank estimate. 9to5Google reports: Notably, this open source solution composed of 10 characters works globally and can be incorporated by other products and platforms for free, with a developer page available here. It works offline and on print when overlaid as a grid on existing maps. Places that are close together share similar plus codes, while the system is identifiable by the "+" symbol in every address. "This system is based on dividing the geographical surface of the Earth into tiny 'tiled areas,' attributing a unique code to each of them," reports Google. "This code simply comprises a '6-character + City' format that can be generated, shared and searched by anyone -- all that's needed is Google Maps on a smartphone."

The first four characters are the area code, describing a region of roughly 100 x 100 kilometers. The last six characters are the local code, describing the neighborhood and the building, an area of roughly 14 x 14 meters -- about the size of one half of a basketball court. The area code is not needed when navigating within a town, while another optional character can be appended to provide additional accuracy down to a 3 x 3 meter region. Users of Google Maps in India will be able to easily find the plus code for any area in the app, while the mapping service along with Search will support the entry of the new coordinate system. Plus codes for any location can also be found with this tool.

Comments

Not invented here

[bohmt]

So they reinvented the Maidenhead locator system.

Re: Not invented here

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention what3words location

Re:Not invented here

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and a few other location coding systems are similar as well. However, Google have their reasons for creating a new system. You can find their evaluation of the various systems explained here:

https://github.com/google/open...

That write-up is pretty much a perfect case study of the classic xkcd comic "There are 14 competing standards".

Re:Not invented here

[Anonymous Coward]

Major reason being: Now you need a smartphone with google maps. Google is no longer optional to your life.

Plusgoogle. Next up: Doubpleplusgoogle, it'll be the new "2.0".

Re:Not invented here

[MachineShedFred]

Didn't click the link, not expecting to find "we wanted our own snowflake system that does exactly what we want, and is less useful outside our organization than existing standards that may already be in use"

Plus, if they expect this to take over for street addresses such as the headline suggests, they should think again. "Oh, it's on Walnut Street, just past 5th" is far more useful than "Oh, it's at CMXR+X6" which has everyone scrambling for Google Maps just to decode what the fuck you just said.

Re:Not invented here

[swillden]

Yes, and a few other location coding systems are similar as well. However, Google have their reasons for creating a new system. You can find their evaluation of the various systems explained here:

https://github.com/google/open...

That write-up is pretty much a perfect case study of the classic xkcd comic "There are 14 competing standards".

Only if you don't understand the comic, or don't understand the write-up, or both.

The point of the comic is that there are a whole bunch of standards and the idea is to invent a single new standard to replace them all. Which doesn't work, and just adds to the pile of standards.

The point of the plus codes writeup is to evaluate the existing standards to see if any of them meets the requirements of one particular set of use cases. Since it's determined that no existing standard does the job, a new one is created, not to replace the others but to address the requirements at hand.

3x3 option code almost mandatory

[guruevi]

3x3m is your average NYC apartment or Indian slum house, you also need to encode elevation and room/apartment numbers in many cases since you could have your code shared by many tenants both in the same plane as well as vertically.

Also, encode up to 1x1m if this is going to be useful for any modern delivery methods (eg robot truck or drone).

Re:what3words

[SmilingBoy]

Disagree. What3Words is proprietary. Something like this needs to be open source really. And whilst w3w may have the advantage of being easily remembered, you cannot tell whether two addresses are close-by. I also don't think it works well across languages as every location has a different name in different languages - the words are not translated but completely different words are used in different languages.

Re:Why?

[Tom]

Japan has addresses, they just aren't street addresses. But they work and are unique, and unless you are a web form developer who thinks the whole world has middle names, states and zip codes, no problem that needs solving exists. They just have a different system.

Many countries have their own variations of systems. Whether street numbers are sequential or even/odd divided upon the two sides. If different entrances to the same building get different numbers, or an entrance designator (e.g. in Vienna you very often get a street address like Somestreet 5/2 where the /2 indicates the 2nd entrance).

This system and its competitors were invented to address your second situation - where no streets exist. That could be geographical (villages clustered around a central point but without streets per se) or circumstancial (slums with no official streets existing) or for any other kind of reason (that old castle on the mountain which is now a Hotel).

I honestly have no idea why they invented a system for that. We already can give the coordinates of any point on Earth with any amount of precision that you need. Sure, VXX7+39 might be slightly shorter than 38.8973,-77.0364 - but it doesn't give me information, for example how far away QXW5+38 is. 38.8039,-77.022 does.

But all that is besides the point. Cities are not just their geography. Many large buildings, for example, have one official entrance for the public to use. The geography of the building doesn't tell you that. The street address does. And many buildings have their doors close to the next buildings entrance, I know several examples where they can both easily fall within the same 3x3m square. Street address makes it clear.

A street address also tells me (if I know the numbering system) which end of a street I need to start at. Here in Vienna, for example,6CJ8+QV and 7FGH+6M are on the same street. The Plus codes gives you no useful information whatsoever. With the street address you can take one look at the nearest building and understand which direction and about how far away each of these destinations is if you are somewhere on that street.

So as a real-life navigation system, zero usefulness.
As a coordinate system, weaker than the ones we already have.
Plus (pun intended) you need access to Google Maps to figure out your current location in Plus Code. But every smartphone will tell you your GPS coordinates, doesn't even need a working network.

Even after checking their Benefits page I still fail to see any advantage whatsoever.

what3words at least has the benefit of memorability.