X Marks the Googlecenter

At the risk of appearing overly enthused about Google Maps this week we've got to say something about Seattle's Googlecenter. Wired talked about the Googlecenter of the US this week and our mother ship Gothamist pointed their readers to NYC's Googlecenter so here we have Seattle's. The Googlecenter is where you end up if you simply zoom all the way in. If you open maps.google.com and zoom all the way down you get to some field in Kansas. If you go to maps.google.com and search for "seattle, wa" and zoom all the way down you get the block above.

We hate that block. We know it from past mapping services and we hate it. Every time Mapquest couldn't come up with an address for something it would plant a little flag on that block and we would mistake it for the location we were searching for. Seriously, this happened to us like three times. The first time we walked around the block about 4 times, and that thing is steep. "There's no damn boat launch here...." The second time it happened we probably walked all the way around before realizing the mistake. "Hey, I've been here before..." In our defense there was probably a year between those two incidents. The third time we fell for it we got within two blocks, knew we'd been had again, and headed home. "Damn." We hate you, Googlecenter of Seattle.