Creating Better URL's for Google Maps

NiceMapUrls is an interesting experiment to create a nice url for a google map location or address. The approach used in the map works in a hierarchical manner, starting from the country and ending with a street name and house number, e.g.

united-states/california/san-francisco/noe-valley/valencia-street/1026

My limited testing of the map suggests that this approach works really well in the United States and many other English language speaking countries. There is a good discussion on Hacker News however about the map and the problems with this approach when place names have non-latin characters or in countries where postal addresses are not so easily defined.

If you want to look at the code behind the app you can check it out on GitHub.