Excuse the rant but I need to get this off my chest.
Google maps is pissing me off. Not for the mapping, which is good (though some more details other than roads would be nice), nor for the interface, which is superb and the main reason I use it above all others. No, the thing that is bugging me is, ironically enough, the search system.
I’m trying to locate a church in Birmingham which I understand is very overgrown and in a state of disrepair, which is a shame for the church but intriguing for photos. It’s called St Saviours and it’s in Saltley. Putting that information in the search produces this result – two places that are nowhere near Saltley. But I managed to get what I think is the full address and tried that. Loads of results all over the show and none of them specific to the church.
This happens a lot because the Google maps search is geared around Yellow Pages listings. If you’re looking for some kind of shop or service then it’s no doubt super but if you’re looking for a location and you don’t know the postcode then you’re stuffed. And when you do find the place, usually by scrolling around and cross referencing with an A-Z, and want to send someone a link to it, can you specify where the marker goes? Can you fuck.
It’s a bloody disgrace, I tell you. If Streetmap.co.uk and Multimap weren’t so fecking ugly I’d leave in a minute. Sort it out.
(I believe the church is here, but not where the marker is – the other end of the road.)
I have to agree with you, it’s become a love-hate relationship. I have entered a street that I know is in Birmingham to receive a list of streets from all over the country but not one is in Birmingham. So I often resort of Route 66 N W Europe, software that isn’t internet dependent but can be used with GPS (neat for finding out where you are when lost in rural France). Route 66 has a limited database of important buildings, such as railways stations, museums, etc. Better than Google’s yellow pages bias.
Close, but I think it’s just round the corner. Like the man said, more Alum Rock than Saltley, I think.
Parish home page, with pics and address.
I spent about 15 minutes doing some googling and typing up a comment. Then my PC crashed. It takes 3 minutes to reboot. Then I spent another ten minutes rewriting the comment. Then the PC crashed again. I hate Windows.
Here are the links, in mostly reverse order. I’ll explain them later.
http://www.virtualbrum.co.uk/images/heartlands/chStJosephs.jpg
http://www.findachurch.co.uk/area/sp/sp08.html
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=22976
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?spn=8.615740,16.845337&hl=en
Google Local – St. Saviour’s Road
Google Saviours Birmingham to see the listing for
St. Josephs & St. Saviours YCA at Adderley Road. Is this possibly the church? Note that Google will return different results for Saviour’s and Saviours. Note also that it’s often best to keep the search terms simple. Start broad, then go narrow, and try alternative spellings. Google sometimes get the names badly wrong. Fewer search terms means fewer exclusions based on errors.
Look at the satellite photo. It looks like a church.
Move southeast to see another church along St. Saviour’s Road
This can be googlemapped with the coordinates 52.486818,-1.858481. This is at the corner of Hall Road and St. Saviour’s Road. I bet it’s St. Saviour.
VERY annoying about Google Local is that if you move around on a map, the URL remains unchanged. There is no way to update the URL – sometimes this is true even if you use the ‘link to this page’ function. One way around this is to track the lat/long coordinates and enter those directly. But even the coordinates are absent in many instances. Lame. Beyond lame.
Going to the Google Local UK home page will produce a lat/long string, like this one for St. Joseph’s: ‘geotagged geo:lat=52.498975 geo:lon=-1.871367. Cut this down to ’52.498975,-1.871367′ and use it as a search term. If you’re going up that way, the cemetery is probably to your liking. It is lovely in midsummer with wild lupines and densely overgrown grasses.
Finding the location of a church without knowing the name or street address can be an adventure. But there are two sources of online help: Find-A-Church and British History Online. The former is pretty good if you know what parish/ward the church is in. St. Joe is listed under Birmingham, St. Saviour is listed under Saltley, but gives no address. British History Online has very useful info but is not a complete listing. It does show St. Saviour’s, St. Mark’s, and St. Mary & St. John’s.
Happy sleuthing.
Hmm, previous got scummed up -
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=B8+1HW&spn=0.004078,0.008857&iwloc=near&hl=en
google maps is very pretty but more frustratingthan it is worth, for UK stuff anyway. I can only bear to use it if I have a postcode to type in. Amazing how it makes the Multimap search engine look so clever and clued-up.
It’s not a perfect system, but I much prefer it to multimaps for Geotagging purposes.
Orienting the Google maps first helps – e.g. first Birmingham, then Saltley, then what you want in Saltley.
It doesn’t produce perfect results in this case, but it does find lots of stuff based in St Saviour’s Church Hall, which (according to the postcode) must be nearby.
Multimap is the better of the two, I only use streetmap for lat/long conversions.
Google need to brush up on reading human addresses, I’ve notcied that google can’t figure out links from upcoming.org.
oh and about the URL staying current when you move, there is the “link to this page” that always seems to work.
I agree with you about the chaotic nature of searching for odd items like this, but I have to note that it was quite easy to confirm where your church is.
Knowing nothing about the location, I went to your “I think this is close” link and turned on the satelite imagry and zoomed in a bit. Sure enough, there it is just around the corner.
Google maps is worthless. Google Earth is brilliant.