Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

How come Google Maps provides so many more local Wikipedia entries that GeoNames?

1st November 2010

My answer to How come Google Maps provides so many more local Wikipedia entries that GeoNames? on Quora

My guess is that GeoNames just uses the latitude/longitude fields from Wikipedia (you can see them in the top right corner of most pages that describe a place), whereas Google actually do some text analysis and attempt to geocode articles themselves, even if they don’t have an exact latitude longitude assigned to them.

This is How come Google Maps provides so many more local Wikipedia entries that GeoNames? by Simon Willison, posted on 1st November 2010.

Next: Would you recommend using Google Go with web.go, or Node.js for a new web server project which will involve high IO?

Previous: If I have data that loads using  json / JavaScript will it get indexed by Google?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe