In response to the many changes that Google has made of late in Maps, Google is once again surveying some Map users (Survey URL) with questions as to speed of the service, quality of data and customer service level satisfaction. If the survey is unavailable at the link above you can view this PDF of the survey.

When Google upgraded Maps with the blueline upgrade in late July, they temporarily lost the abililty to allow easy rerouting of their directions. That loss led to an avalanche of small business complaints from companies that were using Google for daily routing of their vehicles. The most recent change to using TeleAtlas has led to a new series of complaints from SMB’s using Google’s routing noting that whole locations (not just the functionality) have been lost.

Has anyone seen Union County NC? That’s the question a small business owner outside of Charlotte, NC is asking of Google after their recent change to using TeleAtlas mapping data.

In this posting to Google Groups, this small business person, using Google Map’s routing, is complaining that the data necessary for his daily routing task is either missing or unusable due to its age. I wonder how he would answer the survey?:

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TOPIC: Totally lost – Tele Atlas disaster
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== 1 of 4 ==
Date: Mon, Sep 22 2008 7:54 am
From: “cbrente@gmail.com”

I’ve used google maps for almost four years to provide routing instructions for the drivers at my small business. It was always wonderful. Now, with this change in data providers, the maps for my local area are so outdated that they are unusable. I’m talking data that is in some cases 50 YEARS out of date. Roads that no longer exist or have been extensively re-routed, place names appearing that I had to ask my grandmother about, etc. Of course, the satellite overlay and the road map overlay are now utterly dissimilar.

I’ve tried reporting this to Tele Atlas but their error reporting system is designed to report ONE place incorrectly labeled or ONE street wrong. There is no way to report to them that a map for entire county (some 10 zip codes) has data from the 1940’s all over it. I have tried multiple times.

This is for Union County, NC (zips including but not limited to 28110 28112 28111 28174 28103 28104 28105. This is the eastern ‘burbs of Charlotte, NC, the 19th largest city in the freaking country. It isn’t like this was some backwoods locale.

Navteq was dead-on accurate. Tele Atlas is completely unusable. I’m going to have to migrate my entire system to maps.live.com as a result. They still use Navteq.

== 2 of 4 ==
Date: Mon, Sep 22 2008 12:48 pm
From: Maps Guide Adam

Thanks for letting us know about this issue. We’ve reported it to the data provider. As we mentioned in the following post you can report data errors directly to Tele Atlas using the link provided here:

Thread to report TeleAtlas problems

Thanks for your feedback.

Maps Guide Adam
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The take away is the many small businesses have grown to rely on Maps and are not afraid to let Google know of their dismay. I guess that one could say that “hell hath no fury like a small business person scorned”.