Simon Willison’s Weblog

How come Google Maps provides so many more local Wikipedia entries that GeoNames?

1st November 2010

My answer to How come Google Maps provides so many more local Wikipedia entries that GeoNames? on Quora

My guess is that GeoNames just uses the latitude/longitude fields from Wikipedia (you can see them in the top right corner of most pages that describe a place), whereas Google actually do some text analysis and attempt to geocode articles themselves, even if they don’t have an exact latitude longitude assigned to them.