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August 2, 2007 10:56 AM PDT

Yahoo Maps can't spell

by Elinor Mills

OK. This post may be very San Francisco-centric. But I expect more from Yahoo Maps than the misspelling of a legendary city district.

Haight Ashbury may have a Ben & Jerry's ice cream shop and an increasing number of overpriced shoe stores now, but it was ground zero for a cultural movement in the 1960s that still greatly influences sex, drugs, and rock and roll 40 years later.

According to Yahoo Maps, though, it's spelled "Height Ashbury."

Interestingly, the man at the helm of Yahoo, co-founder Jerry Yang, was born in 1968, a year after the famed "Summer of Love." But that's no excuse.

Nice catch by Valleywag.

Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor.
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Sigh...
by themortalgod August 2, 2007 1:50 PM PDT
i almost laughed when i saw this in the feed, how many millions of things are labeled in the yahoo map database, somebody finds one typo and it makes the CNET main feed as a headline hahahahaha, people make mistakes, such is life...
Reply to this comment
Google Maps can't spell either
by kevin-p August 2, 2007 2:43 PM PDT
Google Maps thinks there is a body of water in Brooklyn called Sheepheads Bay. Bzzzt! It's Sheepshead Bay.
Reply to this comment
?
by pcbear August 2, 2007 2:47 PM PDT
Nothing else to write about huh?

ZZZ
Reply to this comment
don't blame yahoo, yet.
by ahoier August 2, 2007 3:24 PM PDT
It's all about "DRM" err....huh? Yes...lol. Non-Digital Rights Management...

I heard of it years ago from my English and Geography teacher(s), I think Digital Life TV mentioned it too once or twice on their 'cast(s)...

Yahoo! gets their mapping data from some other "mapping" company. That "mapping company" whoever it may be, created this typo in their database, so they can track down copyright infringements...

Say, if another competitor-mapping company came around, maybe released an atlas or something, with that same typo....the company could be in trouble :)

I heard dictionaries have this stuff to, "fake" words that aren't even real.....but who really reads a dictionary from front to back? We never know where these "fakes" are...


Just a possibility ;)
Reply to this comment
Like Trivial Pursuit
by wylbur August 6, 2007 3:58 PM PDT
That is a very reasonable explanation. That is also the reason why
you find some glaring errors in Trivial Pursuit-- something the
publishers have used to find infringers. As unlikely as it seems,
people have republished the infamous "moops" answer highlighted
in Seinfeld's Bubble Boy episode and gotten caught.
it's spelled "V E N D O R"
by ckon3 August 3, 2007 10:29 AM PDT
Yahoo maps uses a mapping data vendor, just like every other map site (Google and Yahoo use the same one, Navteq, just different versions). You know, picking on Yahoo isn't even sport any more, it's just journalistic bullying. You forgot to mention, by the way that some brain surgeon at CNET's ZDNet subsidiary just wrote a column suggesting that Yahoo should buy Orkut... which is owned by Google? Can't blame that on a vendor, that's just bad journalism.
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