The difference between small business success and insolvency was based on the shier luck of being graced with the presence of someone in contact with the priesthood of Google, where no real contact from the plebian citizenry is allowed.

Exactly this kind of thing is why the EU feels the need to regulate the shit out of U.S. big tech.

Eventually, these systems will be mostly artificially generated, and perhaps the machines will have fewer error rates than the humans. Perhaps not. But how many humans will understand the machines well enough to ask these questions in the first place?

Machines were supposed to free us from bureaucracy. Not freeze it everywhere with few avenues for escape.

I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.

Google, Wise and heck Maps were started with the ambition of adding something to the world — e.g. Google's original "organize all knowledge" mission - but over time cruft accrues and these companies rapidly accumulate negative side effects / drift away from their core mission.

When was the last time Google / Alphabet / whatever did something that involved improving access to the world's knowledge? They've degraded their search to the point of uselessness and beyond. Slowly alienated their best researchers and engineers. And done their best to turn away from the entity that made Google Books — "we'll scan all the books for the good of all humankind."

You can be browsing the area and suddenly, yep, there's a glacial valley there in the middle of the river. According to Google.

This is a large-scale geographical feature that crosses most of Germany and Poland. But actually it's in the river next to Friedrichstraße station.

This was definitely true 4-5 years ago. I looked now and it's mostly better at most levels of zoom.

The only universal address input is a freeform text box. Optionally with a country, which should also be a freeform text box because countries get created and destroyed and you won't remember to update it. City or district is probably okay - as a freeform text box - addresses without one can write (no district). But street addresses are different everywhere and must be freeform unless you're the government of that region.

More concretely, a postcode is usually specific to between 7 and 30 dwellings, in the usual case it's about 15 houses.

Contrary to common belief, they're not always on the same street, but in the vast majority of cases (like maybe 99%) house number + postcode is sufficient. Definitely flat number + building name/number + postcode should get your stuff there.

But yes, they could serve well as ad space.