Google responds

I'm told by Alex Fay, legislative deputy to Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, that Google will be fixing its maps listing Van Nuys as "Van NY."

When I saw this morning's post about the Van Nuys error on Google Maps, I passed it on to a friend who works at Google (not in the maps division). He filed a bug with the Google tech team, and then he sent me a status report this afternoon:

"The fix for this will likely go live on Wednesday.

"The bug was a result of automatic expansion of the abbreviation N.Y. from data that we get from another company. When writing regular expressions, a period can match any character, so N.Y. was matching Nuys because the programmer did not properly escape the periods."

Thanks for keeping all of us at City Hall informed.

Alex

No, thank you. Meanwhile, another reader spotted that when you type zip code 90095 (UCLA) into Google Maps, you are pointed to the corner of Johnston Street and Terry Place in Lincoln Heights. Only about 15 miles off.