#LGCTM Case Study: Chain leftovers

When chains of stores, supermarkets, banks or anything else disappear from the streets – either due to bankruptcy, or because they are taken over, or rebranded – quite a few of the points of interest (POI) representing them on Google Maps will also disappear. But not all of them. In most cases at least a few of the POIs will remain as virtual representation on Maps, sometimes even years after the actual physical location has vanished from the shopping street. This is especially true for locations that are not part of e.g. a rebranding operation, but where the business is simply discontinued.

The specific example I want to use to showcase this phenomenon is a chain of banks in Belgium called Nagelmackers. As you can see in the screenshot of the Wikipedia page about the bank, there was a rebranding in 2015 when Delta Lloyd Bank in Belgium became Nagelmackers.

What did I find on the map?

So, I explored the map in several areas in Belgium and simply searched for Delta Lloyd Bank in each of the areas. One of them showed the a POI named Delta Lloyd Bank in Ekeren (near Antwerp), as you can see in the screen capture below.

When taking a more detailed look at the POI pictures, I noticed that the main image was quite old – dating back to early 2015. According to the information on Wikipedia, the rebranding had happened in the fall of 2015, so it became quite clear that this was very likely a chain leftover.

What did I do?

The first thing I decided to do then, especially if the POI main image is so old, is check the Street View images, as those are bound to be more recent. And fortunately that was indeed the case. Pretty quickly, I noticed the shop you see in the picture below. Take a close look at the specific way in which the windows are divided into parts at the top, or the way that part of the wall above the windows is at a more or less 45° angle, and compare that to the 2015 image of the bank.

Seems to be the same building, right? As there was no POI showing up on the map that represented this shop, I decided to just type in the name on display on the storefront, Gouden Schaar, combines with the city name, Ekeren, as search term. And bingo, there you had it! As you see in the next screenshot, the POI was already on the map, but had not been shown to me by default. And if you compare the map extract in the 2 screenshots, you will notice that the 2 POIs are located at roughly the same place.

Checking out the Gouden Schaar POI in more detail revealed even a further indication that this was a more recent addition: the main image was dated late 2018, three and a half years after the date on the Delta Lloyd image.

With this overwhelming amount of evidence, I was of course quite confident to submit a Permanently closed for the Delta Lloyd Bank POI.

What was the result?

The result was quite straightforward: after just a few minutes, the edit was approved and the POI was

was marked as Permanently closed. Mission accomplished.

This post is part of the Local Guides Clean The Map project (#LGCTM). All details and links to loads of other posts can be found here.

And here’s an overview of the case studies published so far:

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Hi @JanVanHaver thank you for sharing this post, and I am humbled on what you doing here, the amount of energy and inteligence, research taking you back and forth, I am sure other local guides including me we learning a lot to use in future. Cheers!!

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Perfect, @JanVanHaver

Precisely how it should be done according to the book - if only we had a book on how to edit places on Google Maps! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Thanks for sharing.

Cheers

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This is a great way to keep our contributions up during this time of #stayhome @JanVanHaver love it.

Paul

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@Raphael-Mahumane @PaulPavlinovich thank you for the compliments.

@MortenCopenhagen it should be clear by now that we are collectively writing that book :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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@JanVanHaver I must say that you are a scientist :grin: Keep cleaning the Maps and sharing the case studies with us.

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Bravo @JanVanHaver

I really love such exact searches and findings. These efforts are enjoyable for us and helpful for people.

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Fantastic case of a place being closed yet still surfacing on Maps, @JanVanHaver . Really appreciate your deep dives into situations like these - as someone who wants to focus on cleaning up the map and removing spam and places that have shuttered, this is very helpful and gets me thinking of the best ways to verify before editing.

Thank you!

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I just love doing research like that @SaifIS .Perhaps I should consider a career switch to detective :joy:

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@JanVanHaver the feeling is just like you just solved a cold case:) Well done. I did one recently as well. This is an ongoing battle!

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@Amiran it seems like the very specific examples are the loved most, not only by you.

@SP31 great to hear that it is working inspirational :slightly_smiling_face:

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Such an exquisite approach to editing!

Though I do something like that sometimes, I never thought of taking screenshots and describing it. However, it can be a valuable tip for LGs, indeed.

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@YuliiaZa once you get used to making edits like this, you sometimes forget how many different steps there are in the process, so that inspired me to come up with these case studies (as I have no time to explore the entire globe to find cases like this one :wink: )

One more thing which is quite important here on the forum: if you want to make sure that another Connect user sees a reply you give, make sure to ‘tag’ them by typing the ‘@’ symbol and then select that user from the list (or start typing the name if there is no list).

@JanVanHaver , thanks for a reminder.

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