Where is Giethoorn? That apparently simple question came under fire last weekend. If you tap the tourist destination on Google Maps, the map now indicates the center of the village with a location pin on a busy street in the center. For a long time that pin was in the northern part of the six -kilometer village.
Horeca, boats rental companies and hotels in the north are not happy with that change. Eighteen entrepreneurs sent a fire letter to the municipality this summer for their lost customers. “From one day to the next I no longer rented a boat,” a boat rental company complained on Sunday against RTV Oost.
The municipality of Steenwijkerland had asked Google Maps last year to move the pin. It is the “factual center,” the municipality says in a response to the fire letter. For the declining tourism that the entrepreneurs experience, the municipality points to other factors.
It is not clear why the pin was initially in Giethoorn-Noord. Often something like that is determined algorithmically, says Jeffrey Benning, Google expert at Geosquare, a partner for Google Maps in the Benelux. According to him, users and municipalities regularly submit to change the route guidance to specific locations. “For example, we adjust a stopping place of a campsite, if travelers have to jump over a ditch.”
File trick
The location pin of a village cannot be manipulated directly by users, says Benning. Other dates on the app are. The first known case was artist Simon Weckert who walked around in Berlin in 2022 with a cart full of smartphones, and with it ‘hacking’ Google Maps: Berlin received traffic jams in the city center, without cars.
In the Netherlands, that file-trick did not go unnoticed. In Lissebroek and in Zandvoort this spring local residents closed their streets on Google Maps by reporting with several local residents at the same time in the app that the streets were blocked, so that tourists did not look for a parking space there. If enough reports come in about the same place, Google Maps will take over.
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Looking for a parking space in Zandvoort? Sorry, this street is closed, says Google Maps
Municipal deception
According to Benning, the story of Giethoorn in particular shows how many different parties have an interest in the way in which app users navigate. Municipalities also have an interest in influencing data on navigation apps.
From 2027, according to EU rules, municipalities are obliged to pass on traffic information on, for example, road restrictions and school zones to navigation services
Navigation apps regularly propose detours if there is a traffic jam on the highway. But local roads become overloaded that are not intended for that. In 2019, Flemish and Dutch traffic ministers expressed their concerns about the then increased number of traffic casualties, and pointed to the shortcuts. They talked to the ‘navigation market’.
Since then, municipalities are increasingly passing on traffic information to the navigation services, for example about road restrictions or school zones. Under new European rules in 2027, part of a long -term plan to streamline the European transport system, that is even mandatory. Navigation services must also give priority to the government’s information over other data from the apps. The transition period for those laws has already started this year.
According to Bunning, Google Maps sets the municipal data above the crowd data Who gets users’ company, “but of course only if that information is correct”.
In practice, the data that municipalities provide are by no means always correct, according to Benning. “Are on some points crowd data Much more accurate. They indicate changes very quickly. ” In addition, municipalities can just false the app.
In the Netherlands, the municipality of Súdwest-Fryslân last year by reporting to Google Maps that three bridges to Sneek were closed, during a test with the car-free city center. “That really wasn’t possible,” says Bunning. “You might expect users to try it, but you shouldn’t expect municipalities to deliver that corrupt data.”
Peasantry
Although the automated data on the app can sometimes be more reliable than what the municipality provides, says Benning, when it comes to city planning, manual work is still involved. “In Wageningen, for example, at the request of the municipality, we ‘signed’ all parking spaces, because with automatic data they were not in the right place. In the Maasduinen we did that to spread tourism.”
Incidentally, the Google Maps algorithms also make mistakes without any manipulation. Travelers must therefore continue to use their own “farming sense,” says Benning. The maximum speeds indicated in navigation apps are regularly incorrect, showed a sample of consultancy firm Key Point in 2021. In 2024, two cars in India drove an unfinished bridge in a short time: survivors told that they followed the route on Google Maps. This summer, the app suffered from a large -scale malfunction in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and therefore unjustly closed large parts of German motorways for a few hours.
Whether the pin of Giethoorn was ultimately changed due to human intervention remains uncertain. Entrepreneurs think that it has changed by the municipal request, Benning does not think so. “The request in 2024 was way too long ago, and you can’t park at the new stopping place – weird, if the municipality had chosen that location. It might as well be an algorithmic improvement.”