A VERY incorrect map place marker ...

[maxzook]

... for the listing for the Hungry Cat restaurant:

http://www.chow.com/places/531

The address in the listing is correct (1535 Vine St., Los Angeles, CA 90028), but the place marker is pointing to 1535 E Vine Ave in West Covina ... twenty-seven miles away!

[Jacquilynne]

Is the map on the original place record: http://www.chow.com/places/47850 correct?

We get the data from Google, and sometimes it's less than entirely accurate, or small differences can confuse their database.

[maxzook]

Yes, the above ***/47850 link has a correct map.

Which leads to another question. Back when the link-to-a-map system was first set up, someone in the Chowhound halls of power told me that if there are duplicate links to a restaurant, I should when possible use the one that has a zip code and "USA". Now you're saying the ***/47850 link is the "original place record", even though it has neither

So, the obvious question: how are we supposed to tell the original (and supposedly correct) listing from the duplicate?

[Jacquilynne]

Actually, you're right, the 'older' place has been marked as a dupe -- I was going based on the markings someone else left on the record.

Generally, assuming both are fine, I consider the one with the lower record number in the URL to be the original, but in this case, it looks like someone updated it to be the duplicate, just because the new version had the better map.

[Melanie Wong]

"Back when the link-to-a-map system was first set up, someone in the Chowhound halls of power told me that if there are duplicate links to a restaurant, I should when possible use the one that has a zip code and "USA" "

That only applies on the NYC addresses. "squid kun" has verified all of them and manually inputs a zip code after doing so. As far as I can tell, no one has volunteered to do that work for the LA addresses, which is why it has the most duplicate records of any of the areas.

[DiveFan]

I was going to mention that Google can be fussy about the presence or absence of the 'directional prefix' i.e. N, S, E, W ........ however ......
I copied the address from /531 to /47850 and the latter map location didn't change.
Strange, very strange.

Zip codes definitely are an issue in cities like Los Angeles due to duplicate street names - San Pedro is a good example of why they should be added AUTOMATICALLY like they used to be.

Another possibly related pecularity in Google Maps *recently* is that on my Firefox and Opera browsers the map location updates Very Very Slowly (looks stuck), OTOH IE7 updates fast.

I'd try updating the place with just the city name first to see if the map changes.

[maxzook]

HURRAH! Your suggestion worked!

I removed the street address to leave it at "Los Angeles, CA 90028" and saved the listing. Then I re-entered the street address and saved it again, and now it points where it should point. Thanks for the suggestion!

(All this was an issue for me because I had put in the badly-mapped listing as #15 in a ordered Chow List with 25 entries, and the only way I could figure to make it right was to delete numbers 15 through and 25 and re-enter them. So this has saved me at least half an hour of labor!)

[Melanie Wong]

Congrats! Pls remember that the LA database is maintained by posters, so be sure that there is only one record for Hungry Cat. Here's more about the issue of proliferating duplicates that DiveFan knows all about,
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/624780