Reinventing the wheel without any clear advantage.<p>Plus codes don't seem to have any advantage over widely used MGRS (Military Grid Reference System). <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System</a>
I’m not so sure 6GCRPR6C+24 is a great replacement for an address, but maybe I just don’t know.<p>Although I could memorize my own address, I’d have a hard time memorizing my friends’ addresses. Yes, nobody knows each other’s phone numbers anymore, but those were a very temporary relic from a very short span of time (the telephone era). Humans have always known each other’s addresses, and have always spent a lot of time telling each other their locations in the form of a spoken address.<p>On a more technical note, I am guessing this works super-well for auto-completion, but didn’t see any example of that in the README...<p>All of the various geonaming systems seem very Esperanto at the moment. I think we (as in all of us, the global community) could build upon Google’s effort to come up with a much more human-friendly system to provide easy global addressing. Yes, the address format system is way too localized and breaks down at both scale and small distances; whatever that code was at the beginning of my post (I’ve already forgotten it, and I’m too lazy to re-paste it) is just not nearly as easy to remember as “100 Ocean Drive” or whatever. I also have no clue how I might represent the building next door.
A shoutout to Rober Dam who built Xaddress, "Give 7 billion people an instant physical address": <a href="http://xaddress.org/" rel="nofollow">http://xaddress.org/</a>
Have people here heard of "what3words"? It's a similar encoding scheme that is much more human-memorable (for English speakers, at least).<p>The same spot, to +-1.5m is universe.renovated.upon as opposed to 6GCRPR6C+24
I have asked this question to a member of the Google maps team, and have not gotten a precise answer. Is there some scheme which can distinguish between floors of a building? This is very useful, for example, store locations inside malls. The LatLong scheme does not seem to be enough. I'm guessing that it will have to be 3D, but I have never heard of a standard location scheme which incorporates this information.
So, did they just reinvent the Maidenhead locator ( <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System</a> ) or any of the previous systems?
"Codes that are similar are located closer together than codes that are different."<p>I dug hoping to find out how they handle boundary effects, and gave up.<p>The numbers 0.999999 and 1.000000 are far apart in Hamming distance but close in position. What bounds are achievable for the maximum Hamming distance between two nearby locations, in any such system? Do they approach the theoretical limit here, or is "that are similar" a crock that only sometimes holds?<p>For example, for a base 12 location code one could overlay a dodecahedron onto the earth, then rotate it by a low-discrepancy sequence of quaternions for successive digits. This would have very nice bounds for the maximum Hamming distance between nearby locations, at the expensive of efficiency: each successive digit subdivides the location by far less than a factor of 12. As locations approach each other, vanishingly few rotations will distinguish them.<p>One can imagine easy fixes for this scheme, but what is the theory? Do they have a theory? Do they implement it?
HAM radio locator grid does pretty much the same thing, with I would say roughly the same precision.<p>example:
<a href="http://k7fry.com/grid/?qth=JN17EB67UN" rel="nofollow">http://k7fry.com/grid/?qth=JN17EB67UN</a><p>I only knew of the 6-character location code, which is typically used when identifying yourself, but it seems there's the expanded version of up to 10 characters.<p>What I don't understand is the usage scenario. Plus codes are not human-friendly like street addresses, so I'm assuming they're meant for machine processing. But there you have all these other systems like HAM location codes or MGRS, that I don't see added value.
Why wouldn't they use 36 (Letters+digits) to break it down in a 6x6 area instead? Much more precise at the same length.<p>At 6 length, you're already down to the kilometer precision at the equator. At 9 length you're down to 4 meters.<p>And that's with a dumb grid division, which is very uneven on the globe, the cube projection is probably a better way to deal with it.
For those wondering why they invented yet another grid coding system, here's their justification : <a href="https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...</a><p>The XKCD on competing standards comes to mind…
Perhaps there's an underlying psychological advantage to using Plus Codes. This past week I had to manually transfer coordinates of various locations from one handheld google machine to another google machine. It was less tedious to use the Plus Codes.
I wish delivery services (mainly food delivery) would accept directions using this, like "Appartment block entry at XXXX+XX with entry code YYYY, building entry XXXX+XX with door code ZZZZ" (with code parsing somehow).<p>They keep getting things wrong for my location, but things like that (= simple and integrated with maps) would make it easy.
What's neat about this is its simplicity; its unencumbered nature; and its independence from any particular mapping or ontology beyond "a rectangularish portion of the surface of a sphere".<p>One neat application is for biologists recording locations of field samples.
Aside, if you ever have to do location based matching, having an index on hashes for rough locations with neighboring locations in multiple passes will often be faster than geo indexing.
This is really cool, but not really that much easier than coordinates. The good thing about coordinates is that you can choose the kind of granularity you want.<p>But kudos to Google for doing this.
I'm involved with a startup that I believe has a wonderful solution to this and other related problems. Our website: <a href="http://qalocate.com/" rel="nofollow">http://qalocate.com/</a><p>Our platform: <a href="http://qalocate.bamsaas.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/QA-Locate-Platform-Overview.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://qalocate.bamsaas.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/QA-Lo...</a><p>The biggest issue with solutions like this isn't that they aren't clever, or even that they aren't better than say a geohash or lat/lon, but that they have the wrong target. Computers don't really care since its just as easy to parse a geohash, a lat/lon, or an open location code. The tricky bit is when humans get involved.<p>Its humans that have way more limitations when it comes to using complex systems. And frankly, humans still use addresses because the system co-evolved with us and our needs. Addresses solve the problem well enough, and have "outs" for when they don't work. For a bit more in-depth discussion on this see: <a href="http://qalocate.bamsaas.com/2018/04/04/addresses-are-complicated/" rel="nofollow">http://qalocate.bamsaas.com/2018/04/04/addresses-are-complic...</a><p>So if we want to replace addresses, then we really have to think outside the box. Fortunately, the web has done a lot of the heavy pushing by introducing all kinds of new, useful, and exploitable semantics that we can apply in other domains.<p>Humans are pretty good at using names for things. When computers were first networked, we soon replaced IP addresses with names. Thus was DNS born. We then combined that with another id, and soon we had email.<p>We believe that a similar system can be used for locations. No one really cares about the exact geohash or lat/lon of a location, or the niftyness of your coordinate system. Instead, what we need are memorable names. So why not just use names?<p>That's what LNS (<a href="http://qalocate.bamsaas.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/QA-Locate-Location-Naming-System-LNS%E2%84%A2.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://qalocate.bamsaas.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/QA-Lo...</a>) is. It works very similarly to DNS and allows one to link arbitrary names to exact coordinate locations, structures, or even regions.<p>For example, I can have "thelittlenag.frontdoor" if I want to point someone to the exact coordinate of my front door. If I want drone deliveries, then maybe I tell Amazon to use "thelittlenag.deliverydrone". The lawn guy can use "thelittlenag.propertyboundaries" to figure where my property lines start and end. And "thelittlenag.house" and "thelittlenag.gardenshed" can logically reference as entities(!) the two structures we have on our property.<p>PM me if you have any questions.