this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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DeGoogle Yourself
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How exactly are you imagining Maps doing that change, taking this as a specific example? Pichai's red trump phone ringing? Immediate order within Google after someone read Trump's xwitter posts?
For the US Google polls the data from GNIS (which is an official government entity), just as there is the CGNDB for Canada, OSNGD for the UK, CGA for Australia, and something similar for anything that's remotely considered a first world country.
This is not a political change, it probably would cost Google more effort to not follow the rename, instead of relying on the systems and processes that are in place for years already.
If this were about pulling data from GNIS, it would have taken at least a month to show up on their platform. Its governent data and legacy data pipelines.
Some Google developer had to write an entry for this to happen so fast. 100%.
Do you have a source for Google pulling for GNIS? I can't imagine it would be an easy thing to collate with Google's own data about geographical features.
https://x.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/1884012692048166951
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/maps/gnis-lake-ontario-lake-america-name-change/
Collating datasets is easier than creating datasets, especially in this size. Literally every single lake, landmark, mountain, street, county, district, points of interest and fuck knows what else, everything with their actual coordinates. It's a massive dataset, and it's massively painful to collect and keep up to date, even for someone like Google. And it's not only saving effort and resources, but also makes discussions like those here obsolete, because they literally do not have their own database.