I think trying to make geo URLs nicer is a noble effort, but this approach takes a far too naive world view.<p>Addresses are messy. In most parts of the world (even the "western world"), addresses are hopelessly ambiguous and much of the world cannot nearly as nicely be divided into a neatly hierarchical addressing system as this example suggests.<p>Real-world addresses are ambiguous, confusing and messy. Pretty much the opposites of qualities that make for a good URL scheme.<p>How do you deal with multiple places with the same name, or one place that is known by many names? Disambiguation pages and 304 redirects to a single canonical name (which might piss a <i>lot</i> of people off if it's a disputed area)?<p>Most civilised parts of the world have developed more precise, less ambiguous addressing systems over time, using post codes and other systematic approaches, but even those are not always watertight, often volatile and only work for places where some body issued them (good luck in the desert or ocean).<p>Geocoding is hard, and reverse geocoding (from a place to a name) is even harder, but fortunately we already have a clear, concise and unambiguous way to address places on earth: the Geographic Coordinate System. Every place on earth can be addressed using a simple latitude/longitude coordinate pair. It's not pretty or user friendly, but at least it's fool-proof.<p>Why not take a much simpler approach, similar to how many blogging platforms generate pretty urls from post titles?<p>The URL in the example could then be:<p><pre><code> https://maps.example.com/37.769944,-122.422264/199-Valencia-St-San-Francisco
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Or just as conveniently:<p><pre><code> https://maps.example.com/37.769944,-122.422264/Zeitgeist-Bar
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This way, multiple URLs can exist for different entities in the same geographic space.<p>Multiple places with the same name are also much less of a problem this way:<p><pre><code> https://maps.example.com/51.528642,-0.101599/High-Street
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vs<p><pre><code> https://maps.example.com/51.528642,-0.101599/High-Street
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For a real-word mapping service, there would probably be a need to specify a zoomlevel or bounding box, but those could be provided as URL parameters. Ironically, this is very close to how the URLs in Google Maps currently look. Not as nice, but at least it's actually feasible and future-proof.