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  • Hacker News
  • [dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495947
    by ChrisArchitect
  • Maybe this was Google being cheeky for once. When I, a Canadian, dragged over the map, the Lake remained Lake Ontario.

    When I search for Lake America, the pin sets itself directly over the same lake with the text "Lake America: The smallest of the five great lakes."

    I hope this was intentional.

    by 220hertz
  • Incredibly embarrassing for Google.
    by jhack
  • I see it as "Lake Ontario (Lake America)" in the UK. This is so petty there must be a word for it in some language somewhere in the world.
    by pelagicAustral
  • "Oops our Google Maps team is on vacation, an intern messed up the lake names microservice called "Lacus" and it is currently unavailable for changes. It will take the Google Maps team 2 years to make this change."

    Thats how they could have pushed back against a dictator. Every finger you give him is a hand you lose.

    by tomasphan
  • Start swimming in Lake America, end up in Lake Ontario. Funnily enough, Ontario is an indigenous word that predates both American and Canadian governments.
    by glitchc
  • Couldn’t we, the rest of the world, continue to see Lake Ontario, as it was before? It’s a very stupid thing to do and I guess most of us, if asked, would be on team Canada..
    by jventura
  • The Google blog post is more useful: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/maps/gni...

      The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" in the United States. Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see "Lake America," those in Canada will continue to see "Lake Ontario," and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names. These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.
    Google is taking the heat for this because they have a fast engineering team that reacted within 48 hours. Based on the "Gulf of America, née Mexico" debacle, the other companies will follow suit when their engineering teams finish the code reviews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14172#Technolo...
    by sxp

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Google Maps Renames Lake Ontario to Lake America · Birbla