placemarks

Yesterday we had a look at what appears in Google Earth placemark popups for placemarks in the “Borders and Labels” layer. Today we are looking at places from the “Places” layer.

The information shown in the placemarks comes from Google Maps and is largely identical to what you see in Google Maps, but often not as nicely formatted. Some information, including the name, address, phone number, website and working hours can be edited via Google Map Maker. Also, the category of the location can be set there (e.g. Airport, School, Hospital, which also determines the icon used in Google Earth). It doesn’t seem to be possible to set the photo in Map Maker. As far as we can tell, the photo displayed is typically the default automatically selected image from Street View (which includes and prioritises user contributed photos).

The White House South Lawn Fountain has its own placemark, including a phone number and reviews.

As seen above, the Google Earth popups tend to add a scroll bar when the photo is too big, so many placemarks require you to scroll down to see all the information, even when there is plenty of screen space.

We found that for some special types of places, the popups are broken in Google Earth. For example, some train stations and bus stops have schedules available in Google Maps but in Google Earth it doesn’t show all the information correctly. Given that Google Earth has a very capable browser built in there is no good reason why the schedule functionality could not be fixed (hint to Google).

We found some places that give an error message in the popup. We believe this is because the placemarks are ported to Google Earth rather infrequently and the placemark has been deleted in Google Maps but the change has not yet been carried over to Google Earth.

If you own a business or are an authority for one of the institutions marked with a placemark, then the best way to ensure your information is correct is to sign up for Google My Business. It is free and essentially gives you a Google+ page where you can fill in all the details of your business, including changing the photo that is displayed and adding extra photos. For best results, you should also verify your address. To accomplish this, Google sends a postcard with a special code to your address, which you then enter into Google My Business to confirm that you received it.

We noticed a few months ago that the Google Earth placemark popups now usually include a photo, a short description and some basic facts about a place. It turns out that the information displayed is identical to what is shown in Google Maps when you search for a location.

Today we are looking at only the popups for places found in the “Borders and Labels” layer. Tomorrow we will look at places from the “Places” layer.

As far as we can tell, the data cannot be managed through Google Map Maker, so it must be managed by Google staff. The information seems to come from a variety of sources, sometimes Wikipedia, sometimes UNData and sometimes it is not stated where it comes from. The choice of facts shown also seems to vary considerably.

We have seen listed: province, municipality, county, federal division, prefecture, region, population, area, area code (telephone), postal code, unemployment rate, the name of the mayor (does this get updated each election?), elevation, founders, date of establishment, number of airports, parishes, ecclesiastical province, dialect, bird (common in Japan) and flower.

Although the text often comes from Wikipedia the other statistics do not appear to do so. For example, the population statistics are often quite a bit older than what is available on Wikipedia.

The photos can also be somewhat inaccurate. For example the photo for Linda, a township in Livingstone, shows a picture of the gorges below the falls. It was probably automatically picked from the photos layer and had been originally incorrectly placed. The photo for Zimba, another town in southern Zambia just shows a view of trees and grass. The photo probably does come from a location nearby but is not really representative of the town.

If any of our readers knows when the placemarks were changed to their current format please let us know in the comments.

As with all mapping data in Google Earth if you notice mistakes the way to get it corrected is via feedback links in Google Maps, as Maps is the primary source of the data in most cases. If you are willing to put in more effort then you can also use Google Map Maker.

While researching this post we discovered a mistake with the Capital of Belgium. It is shown in Google Earth twice as Brussels and Brussel. We believe the issue is in Google Maps data, which shows two versions of the border, depending on whether you search for Brussels or Brussel and has other issues as well.

Mountains have their own special type of placemark, which doesn’t exactly match Google Maps. In the case of Mount Rainier above, the Google Maps version has a more up-to-date copy of the Wikipedia text but lacks the elevation profile data.