The open source neighborhood project can be found at http://www.zillow.com/labs/NeighborhoodBoundaries.htm

Curious

Maponics did acquire another resource to add to our neighborhood boundary data, but any attempts by another company (that may have had access to it earlier) to distribute that data through open source would be illegal. I’d be leery if I were you about any company saying they had permission to freely distribute someone else’s data. I think the idea of an open source project is a good one though.

Curious that you don’t have a name by the way…

Darrin

- Curious

Good call Ian. Are they getting it from Urban Mapping (www.urbanmapping.com) then? (See, I can share the seo wealth!)

Seriously though, I think the issue of neighborhood map data quality is important for local search and knowing where the data comes from is important for advertisers as well. With disclosure of data sources comes accountability for updating the data.

i think you’d know if google were getting their ‘hood data from your company
but good SEO thinking on the post!

Darrin

Thanks for pointing me to this article. You are right its very hard to define something like neighborhoods cause there are too many ways to approach this topic. There is way more to this than just the colloquial terms like “soho” etc. but also districts used for elections or governmental issues etc etc. But 9% is a huge number anyway. Imagine you can increase the coverage of onbox results in Google web search by 9% the gain of visibility for Maps would be huge.

In Europe we are facing another additional “issue” because all the countries do have a different approach in handling “locations”.

Again thanks for your reply.