Google Maps is throwing up some creepy results. Photo / Google Maps
Google Maps is throwing up some creepy results. Photo / Google Maps
Someone on Google Maps just labelled President Obama a very bad word.
If you enter a search for "N***** king" - which contains a particularly offensive racial epithet for African Americans - Google Maps will point you to the White House.
It even zooms the camera in, automatically. (For sensitivity's sake, we have partially obscured the search term and the auto-complete responses in the GIF below.)
"Some inappropriate results are surfacing in Google Maps that should not be, and we apologise for any offense this may have caused," said a Google spokesperson. "Our teams are working to fix this issue quickly."
A mounting list of such pranks has led Google to suspend people's ability to submit edits to Google Maps for the time being.
"We are temporarily disabling editing on Map Maker starting today," product manager Pavithra Kanakarajan said in a message to users, "while we continue to work towards making the moderation system more robust."
Other "mistakes" on Google Maps have emerged, such as the White House being mislabeled as Edward Snowden's lair and an image appearing over Pakistan featuring an Android mascot urinating on an Apple logo.
The errors are likely the result of other users submitting changes to Google Maps that somehow made it past the company's moderation process. The search giant has been working on a fix since at least last week, when it disabled the ability for users to make edits to Google Maps. And the company is hoping to publish an explanation as soon as today on what went wrong.
"If you type my name, Alex Hern, into Google, it brings you, not to The Guardian, where I work (and which would make sense), but to the pub in London Bridge where I play the card game Netrunner most weeks. To the best of my knowledge, I've been linked online to that pub once, ever," he wrote.
Then Twitter got involved:
@alexhern Mine offers me three choices: Where I went to university My former employer WHERE I AM RIGHT NOW
