Originally Posted by
patc
Hmmph. Don't bother with this test if you live in Canada, or Ottawa anyway. It gave me a score of 44, but pretty much messed up on its tests.
The grocery store list missed BOTH large-chain groceries stores, one of them across the street!
The restaurant and coffee shops list both miss several locations
The bars list is rather weird. Dairy Queen is a bar?
It missed a huge movie theatre complex.
It missed several schools, and the two closest branches of the Ottawa Public Library
It missed the huge Chapters books nearby, as well as the Home Depot.
I know most of these places on are Google Maps, so the filtering used by this site must be wonky. Chexk your won results carefully!
That's Google mapping for you. It got Winnipeg all wrong too. But in general when you look things up on Google maps you'll see it is missing all sorts of stuff in Canada. Near where I live, a dam was built back in the early 1980s, and as a result a whole new set of roads was built, as well as a large recreational area (lots of campgrounds and stuff). All the paper maps since the early 1980s have all this information ... but Google maps doesn't. There's no lake (just the original river), and none of the new roads. It's like whoever created Google maps dug out an old map from a bottom drawer from about 1975 and based it all on that.
When I put in my address in Winnipeg the program ...
-- doesn't list the large grocery store about 1 km away from where I lived where I walked to get 99% of my groceries.
-- lists a library on the other side of the Assiniboine River ... but there are no bridges at that point, and it would be a very long walk to get to that library by the bridges that actually do exist.
-- doesn't list the library which was actually in my neighborhood, about 1 km away.
-- calls one store by a name it hasn't been called for probably about 7 years.
-- says there are no schools in the area ... but there is a high school about 0.5 kms away, and an elementary school where I walked to attend yoga classes about 1.5 kms away, and a few others just a little bit further than that.
-- doesn't list 3 other large grocery stores a little bit further away, but still sort of in the area.
-- doesn't even list the local Walmart!
Yeah, from looking at the map and what they do list in the way of roads, stores, etc., I'd say it is based on information from approx. 10 years ago. One bridge exists there which was built about in about 1997, but a mall is also on the map and it was demolished in about 1999, I believe.
It also seems to favor the little obscure places shops rather than the larger stores ... Superstore, Safeway, Zellers, Walmart, K-Mart, Extra Foods, and all the bigger, more well known ones aren't on there.