Google Maps (almost) useless in Crimean Crisis
For those of us who do not read the Cyrillic alphabet, Google maps has become almost useless during the current Crimean crisis. For example I, like many people, am wondering “Just how close is the Crimean peninsula to Sochi?” Here’s what Google Maps gives me:
https://maps.google.com/?ll=44.355278,36.342773&spn=5.168793,9.371338&t=m&z=7
Apparently, Google maps has decided that all place names should be in the local language (and alphabets). Which is a good idea (Take that, you English language hegemonists!) for the default option, but if you’ve got a database with the place names in a variety of languages (which Google obviously does have), why not make it available? Well they do, sort of, if you get the iframe link for embedding in your own web page:
Here’s the Bing Maps version — and I must admit that Bing maps has become the default option for this armchair cultural imperialist, and least when world crises are taking place somewhere that doesn’t use the latin alphabet…