Sometimes you come across a duplicate on Google Maps that is quite easy to spot as the 2 points of interest (POI) are really close together, have the same name and the same category (and therefore also the same icon associated to that category) – one wonders how the Maps user who added that second place failed to see the one already on the map.
But in some cases the situation is much more intricate, and this is a detailed one of those and the measures I took when coming across it.
What did I find on the map?
Take a look at the Google Maps screenshot, showing the way it was when I stumbled upon this. It shows the city center of the beautiful Belgian city of Diest, where I have marked 3 POIs.
The first (bottom left) was called ‘KAAI DIEST’ and categorized as ‘Museum’ (whereby the name triggered 2 alarm bells right away: name in ALL CAPS and city name as part of the POI name), the second one (in the middle) had ‘De kaai’ as name and ‘Historical Landmark’ as category, and the third one (top right) was a ‘Café’ called ‘Café De Kaai’.
What did I do?
The first step, as always, was to take a detailed look at the information on the 3 POIs on Maps itself and also consulting other sources, like the official website of the city of Diest (which has a section listing the museums in the city, where no museum with that name or address is listed). The POI labeled as museum also turned out to have the same telephone number and website as mentioned on the café POI.
My best guess as to what might have happened: someone wanted to add the ‘KAAI DIEST’ as landmark, but did so with incomplete data and did not find a fitting category (finding the best category often requires you to know the exact term as it is listed within the Google Maps database of POI-categories, and those terms are at times not very intuitive), and therefore decided to select ‘museum’. Later on, this POI might then have been edited by another local guide - who thought the POI was referring to the café nearby – adding the telephone number and website URL.
Given this outcome for my research, I decided that 2 of the POIs needed to be merged, and that the ‘KAAI DIEST’ one was the best choice as the one to be reported as duplicate. But I also immediately realized that a straightforward reporting it would very likely lead to the dreaded ‘NOT APPLIED’ as the data on it were partially similar to the either of the other two.
So, before trying to report it as duplicate, I suggested 3 separate edits for ‘KAAI DIEST’ in a specific order, and in between waited until each of the edits was approved by the algorithms before making the next edit. The goal was to make the data almost identical with the café POI (as the telephone number and website – data points claimed to have a high weight within the total POI-data - were already the same).
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changed the category from Museum to Café
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edited the address & map marker
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changed the name from KAAI DIEST to De Kaai
All 3 edits were approved instantly, as you can see in the screenshot below (notifications are always sorted with the newest at the top of the list).
What was the result?
Once all this was done, I felt pretty confident about reporting the POI as duplicate. And the confidence was justified: the suggested removal was also approved within seconds.
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:
.Approved just after the edit . 
