Over the weekend I was driving around Sunnyvale trying to find a place to live that is close to work when I decided that I needed some things from Wal-Mart. Now, I am not familiar with the area so, I pulled out the blackberry and loaded up Google maps. I have the curve with the GPS so, finding places near me is really simple. I typed “walmart” in the search and quickly got a list of local Wal-Mart stores. The closest looked to be in Moutainview, so I clicked on “directions to here” from my location and got the turn by turn. Here is where the problem comes in… I followed the directions right to the NASA Ames research facility. The directions took me right up to the security checkpoint! There is no Wal-Mart located on the military base. What went wrong here? Well, upon further inspection, I found that the Wal-Mart that I had chosen to go to was listed as Wal-Mart, Mountainview, Ca. Because there was no street address, I guess google wanted me to see where thier new facility on base would be or something. Lisa was with me and she has a military ID so we went on base to see where the map goes… The map led me right to the big NASA hanger (pictured below). Maybe, Google Earth saw a big ass building and assumed it must be a Wal-Mart. Needless to say, I was not happy about it. Perhaps making the app smart enough to at least warn that there is no street would be nice! Lesson Learned though.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Maps, Fail