American Business is All at Sea

This is a map by Joseph El Haddad that shows businesses which Google Maps shows as being located in the sea. In other words it is a map of misplaced businesses due to geolocation and data entry errors. The Distribution of Businesses Located at Sea map shows tens of thousands of wrongly mapped businesses and provides a glimpse into how data entry mistakes ripple across the web’s most popular mapping platform.

Quick Stats from the Deep

El Haddad’s dataset reveals that nearly 73% of these misplaced points share the exact same coordinates: (46.423669, -129.9427086) -  an unlikely business hub located far off the coast of Washington State. In comparison only 4% sit at (0,0), the notorious “Null Island” off Africa’s west coast, a well-known placeholder for missing map data. 

Although the map does not say so I think that the map may only show the results of scraping data for California - which may explain why Null Island does not feature as often as 46.423669, -129.9427086.

The Mystery of 46.4°N, 129.9°W

In a blog post Google Maps Plan El Haddad explains why so many businesses are wrongly placed in the sea at 46.4°N, 129.9°W. Apparently if you take the coordinates of the geographic extremes of U.S. territory - the northernmost, southernmost, easternmost, and westernmost points listed on Wikipedia - then 46.4°N, 129.9°W lies almost exactly at the center of that range. In other words, this spot off the U.S. West Coast may have been chosen as a default “center point” for American coordinates, a kind of “Null Island of the United States.”

Common Errors in Geocoding Data

Geocoding mistakes are surprisingly common, and they reveal how fragile location data can be. Some of the most frequent issues include:

• Null values: Missing latitude or longitude fields often default to (0,0) - placing points on the map at the equatorial “Null Island” in the Atlantic Ocean.
• Integer approximations: When decimal precision is lost through rounding or truncation, locations can shift by dozens or even hundreds of miles.
• Sign inversions: Flipping a positive to a negative (or vice versa) - for example, +45°E instead of −45°W - can send a point to the opposite side of the globe.
• Dummy coordinates: Developers sometimes use placeholder coordinates for invalid or incomplete data, unintentionally creating clusters of “phantom” businesses floating in the sea.
• Latitude–longitude swaps: Accidentally switching the order of latitude and longitude - a common problem when different systems expect coordinates as lat, long or long, lat. It can displace a location thousands of miles from where it should be.