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frankj3

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When I input my home address in Google Earth, it finds my street OK but lists my home at the south end of the street when I live on the north end. That's about 1/8 mile difference.

I have not knowingly made any changes in my settings on GE so how can I get it to show my correct location?

I have version 4.0.2722 installed on my PC. There are no updates available from GE.

I hear wonderful things about GE but I'm a little concerned about the accuracy.

Any help would be appreciated.

Just in case you couldn't tell ------- I'm a newbie!!

Frankj3 (Texas bred and born!)

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When I input my home address in Google Earth, it finds my street OK but lists my home at the south end of the street when I live on the north end. That's about 1/8 mile difference.

6-700 feet of accuracy from a geocoded address is actually well within the limits of geocoding precision.

I have not knowingly made any changes in my settings on GE so how can I get it to show my correct location?
If you want an exact location, enter a latititude/longitude pair. In most cases that'll get you within a few dozen feet.

 

It's not like there's a database of lat/lons for every mailbox on the planet. Programs know the lat/long of an intersection and the closest house it 100 main street and they may know the lat /long for a house that's ten blocks away where the nearest house is 999 main street - they may not unreasonably deduce that 500 main street is half way between those pairs.

 

This, of course, works very well in areas where houses have equal density on equally sized lots with equally distributed house numbers - which is a very tiny subset of the Real World.

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GE is only as accurate as the data it uses. What you are experiencing is your address being geocoded to a point along the street, based on an address range assigned to the street centerline. For example, on my street the actual addresses range from 4000 to 4020, however, the GE street centerline has an address range assigned of 4000 to 4099. So, when 4015 is geocoded, the geocoder thinks the address is near the beginning of the street when actually the address is almost at the end of the street. If the street address range was more accurate, the address would be placed more accurately. Generally speaking, a lot of the address range data was obtained from a Census bureau source. The Census bureau is notorious for having liberal address range data.

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Point taken, Kerecsen. I meant to amplify that but I got distracted. It's true that Teleatlas is the other major game in town, but in the U.S. and especially in the readership of this group, I just can't consider them a leader in market share. You are, of course, free offer other definitions of ways they can be a leader and you'd be right. There have been many comparisons made.

 

My choice of the word "leader" was based that handheld portable navigation units and mapping software used by geocachers, we could add all the Cobra, Igo, Navman, Navigon, and TomTom users together and they'd be dwarfed by the number of Garmin and Magellan users, both of which use Navteq.[1]

 

Online services like Google and Mapquest tend to use multiple sources as they have less allegiance.

 

So if you really want to kill the problem of missing roads dead, report it to both companies.

 

[1] I have a Mio/Igo with 2006 Teleatlas maps in it and they're really poor in my area but when I look at the online version of a side by side comparison in my area, they've actually caught up and passed Navteq for completeness here. I have no doubt that different areas will place one above the other as they surely leapfrog. Competition is good!

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