28 Jan 2011
Security and common sense.. the two MUST go hand in hand.

I was using Google Maps to derive some lat/longs to show my son some examples of the results for a distance formula, and I noticed something odd. If you enter the address 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC (the White House), it will display the location on the map ( link to results ).

If you use that address as either an origin or a destination to Get Directions, Google’s response is that it doesn’t know how to calculate the directions ( link to results ).

Change 1600 to 1200, and you’ll get an answer (link to results ).

This smells like Homeland Security-ware to me.  If it is, it is one of those clear cases of an action based on fear, rather than rational thought. Whoever intended to protect the White House (and possibly other government locations) really didn’t account for very many user cases in this action. And this is the most well-known building in the world. What are they thinking?

I just hope Google isn’t caving into different kind of pressure from a Government to censor results. To Google’s credit, the previous censorship that was being applied on their site in China is now gone. Two years ago, if I had searched for “Tienanmen Square” on Google’s site in China, I would have seen nothing other than smiling tourists, and bright colored photos that looked like they were retouched with Photoshop for a travel brochure. The results would never have shown any no indication of the 1989 protests and military intervention which followed.  On the US site, the 1989 Tiananmen Square events are ranked at the top.

You can view the current results from the US site here, and the results from their site in China here.  Not much difference between the two.  The Chinese results now come from a domain ending in cn.hk (Hong Kong). Previously it was coming from www.google.cn when censorship was applied.  Whatever is implied by that change, it works… Google got away from the heavy hand of censorship.  Kudos!

I hope the same common sense prevails with Google Maps as well.  It is ironic that the same type of information suppression occurs when you enter Pyong Yang (North Korea).  Yes, this can be a slippery slope.

(Follow-up): Upon further investigation, it became clear that Google’s inability to give driving directions occurs because the actual street address is not accessible by vehicle: it is physically blocked off.  There is similar behavior where the starting point is one continent and ends in another.  The new versions of the software take in to account that there is no physical roadway access to the destination point, and therefore just report that driving directions are impossible to calculate.

Still, the empty map of North Korea is a bit scary.