Wrong map location shown for Little Library venues

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Wrong map location shown for Little Library venues

1gcthomas
Feb 19, 2021, 8:28 pm

For Little Library venues, the map often shows an incorrect location.

For example, https://www.librarything.com/venue/115480/ is located in Berkeley, CA, but the map shows a location ten miles away in a different city.

It appears the underlying cause is that the map is showing the best result of a search by venue name. For this type of venue, most locations do not have a unique name and do not appear as places in Google's map data, so it would make more sense to query by street address.

2timspalding
Mar 3, 2021, 11:26 am

Thanks for the report.

Basically, Google doesn't know anything about Little Free Libraries, so when we send them the full name and address, they often get confused, chasing down the closest library they can find near the location.

I've solved this by not sending in the "name" when the venue is a Little Free Library. It's possible this will cause problems where the title WAS helpful—as for example if it included the name of a building Google knows. But I think I've solved more problems than I created.