Google Maps 'loses' major Florida city

It's home to 90,000 people, one of the nation's biggest malls, a National Hockey League team and, the city's mayor boasts, the first IKEA store in the state.

But, for at least a month this summer, Google's computers "lost" Sunrise, Florida.

People who searched Google Maps for the city were directed instead to Sarasota, Florida -- a place that, while an alphabetical cousin of Sunrise, is actually 200 miles away. No Sunrise business or addresses or phone numbers showed up. Even city hall and other public entities were strangely absent, according to reports on news sites, blogs and Google help forums.

Google says it has since fixed the "technical error," and if you searched Google Maps for Sunrise on Wednesday, you would find a healthy grid of streets, malls and parks on the far outskirts of Fort Lauderdale, where it's supposed to be.

But this week's fix didn't come until after public outcry.

Sunrise's mayor, Mike Ryan, said this is the third time Google has dropped his city off the digital map, which he says is unacceptable.

"I don't have any problem with the idea that mistakes happen," he said. "The algorithms they have to apply to understand what my search is are undoubtedly complicated. What disturbed us is that this wasn't the first time it happened."

When he heard of the most recent drop, he was in disbelief.

"I said 'holy cow,'" he said. "It felt like a bizarre novel -- that all of a sudden we disappeared. We woke up one morning and we didn't exist in the ether world."

Sunrise isn't the first city that Google Maps has misplaced. The blog Search Engine Land documented five cities -- La Jolla, California; Rogers, Minnesota; Wickliffe, Ohio; Woodstock, Virginia, and Imperial Beach, California -- that Google Maps has also lost and found.

The Mountain View, California, company did not respond to CNN's questions about those previous outages, nor did it provide details about the Sunrise case.

The company did say it had fixed the problem and that it strives to deliver "the richest, most up-to-date maps possible."

via Google Maps 'loses' major Florida city - CNN.com.