logoalt Hacker News

willtemperleyyesterday at 1:20 PM2 repliesview on HN

This comment is inaccurate! Web Mercator causes such large errors in geolocation that the NGA had to issue an advisory about it [1].

There is a whole science behind map projections and Google ignored it entirely when they created Web Mercator, which was a hack to divide the world into a quad tree. It was vaguely clever and utterly stupid at the same time.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140607003201/http://earth-info...


Replies

willtemperleyyesterday at 3:37 PM

> Accuracy where it matters is why

Why the downvotes for correcting this laughable statement? Web Mercator is well documented as being extremely inaccurate.

show 1 reply