A trick for incorrect driving directions in Google Maps

To get good driving directions you need a good street database and a good destination!

You can get the latitude and longitude for an address with this tip on how to geocoder an address with Google Maps.  But you can also use that same trick to get the lat,lng for any location.  Just scroll around in the map, and double click on the point you want.

Now what?  Google maps lets you look up things other than street addresses, and you can get driving directions to almost anything you can look up.  We wrote about this in Google Maps Hacks, so I guess even though it is five years old the book is not entirely useless :-)

Some examples you can enter into the Google Maps search bar:
SFO (an airport code)
954305 (zip code)
38.435514,-122.788203  (latitude and longitude)

And you can also get street directions to these places.  For example:
"241 Florence Ave, Sebastopol, CA to 38.435514,-122.788203 "

What if you are trying to give someone else directions, but you don't like the directions which
Google gives you?  This is pretty common!  It was only very recently that Google presented directions to Sebastopol which made sense.  Before the directions sent you on a strange detour!

The funny thing is that O'Reilly Media, the premier computer book publisher and home of Make Magazine, is in Sebastopol.  If anywhere would have a chance of improved directions you'd think it would be us!   (Though maybe the Google guys just fly in by helicopter and don't need road directions :-)

You can create a custom route in Google Maps.  Do your normal search:
"SFO to LAX" for example.  Once the route is displayed  you can click and drag the route to
go wherever you want.  And then click on the ''link" button for a URL.  You can then give people that URL and they will show you the same routing as you selected. 

Or you can type a multi-route direction directly into Google Maps by separating each place with a ':' for example:

'from:20 Rainsville Road, Petaluma, CA 94952-8121 to:NAPA, CA to:SFO'

How to Geocode an address with Google Maps

I get a lot of emails to Geocoder.US asking for me to look up addresses.  The Census data which we use does not know everything :-)

I do my best to help people, but mostly what I do is go to http://maps.google.com and look up the address.

This post describes how you can get a latitude and longitude from an address...