Ever Notice How Often the Cities on Google Maps Change?

It may be a side effect of scaling. That's just an assumption.<p>The algorithm used to determine what will be displayed and to ensure that names will not overlap may also not be deterministic, or not completely.<p>Meta-balls kind of computations can typically generate a different output based on where you start to aggregate stuff.<p>Given the need to handle this at a very large scale, one could imagine that different machines are doing their map/reduce thingy on their own, and that the first responding would be taken into account first, etc.

My guess would be that they are experimenting with the algorithm used to determine which cities are prominent enough to display on the map. As for why it changes so often, perhaps they are not changing the algorithm itself but just fiddling with the parameters in an automated fashion for A/B testing?

The language of the place names seems fairly arbitrary too.<p>I've noticed them switch a few times from English to Welsh and back in Wales - Caerdydd instead of Cardiff, Pen-y-bont for Bridgend. Something similar happened to Ireland for a few weeks last year, too. For some reason, Gaelic seems to be excluded from this; I haven't seen Steòrnabhagh yet!<p>The centring of the map has changed, too - when they first put up the map of the UK, zooming in from the default location would bring you right into the centre of my town. Now it's in the Irish Sea.

For a while, there were a lot of 'ditches' marked on the terrain map of the US. That was some sort of glitch, though, I'm sure.<p>Also, I'm curious to see how long it takes them to update this:<p><a href="http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&#38;hq=&#38;hnear=Via+Monte+Venda,+3,+35143+Padova+Padua,+Veneto,+Italy&#38;ll=45.420018,11.872975&#38;spn=0.003008,0.008224&#38;t=h&#38;z=18" rel="nofollow">http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&#38;hq=&#38;hnear=Via+Monte+...</a><p>That overpass is now complete and operational, as of a month or two ago.

Many map vendors put small mistakes in their maps to make proving theft easy. Changing the layout maybe prevents others from obtaining a consistent set of map tiles by slowly downloading them.

Notice how the labels never overlap? This includes the highway labels. I bet they just randomly start placing labels and once you have a few of them on the map, then there is no way to have the same labels all the time... especially if the edges of the view are slightly different than when it was accessed before.

Could be that the most accessed (zoomed in) cities are shown in the overview map.