Google Maps Renames Lake Ontario to Lake America

pelagicAustral

I see it as "Lake Ontario (Lake America)" in the UK. This is so petty there must be a word for it in some language somewhere in the world.

manvillej

This is the dumbest thing. And we’ve had a lot of dumb things.

jhack

Incredibly embarrassing for Google.

glitchc

Start swimming in Lake America, end up in Lake Ontario. Funnily enough, Ontario is an indigenous word that predates both American and Canadian governments.

sxp

The Google blog post is more useful: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/maps/gni... The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" in the United States. Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see "Lake America," those in Canada will continue to see "Lake Ontario," and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names. These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now. Google is taking the heat for this because they have a fast engineering team that reacted within 48 hours. Based on the "Gulf of America, née Mexico" debacle, the other companies will follow suit when their engineering teams finish the code reviews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14172#Technolo...

kazinator

https://archive.is/hllsk

xnx

Page title is now "Google Maps Changes Lake Ontario to Lake America" which is probably more accurate than "Google Maps Renames Lake Ontario to Lake America" (which could've been the title earlier. Trump renamed the lake. Google just updated the label.

jventura

Couldn’t we, the rest of the world, continue to see Lake Ontario, as it was before? It’s a very stupid thing to do and I guess most of us, if asked, would be on team Canada..

vanelsas

Why not call it Lake Trump, hang a tarp blocking our view to it, and be done with it. The American dream reduced to an idiocracy.

k310

It's yet another distraction from Epstein. Every insane and destructive action since January 2025 has been a distraction from Epstein and his clientele. Trade war on your number one neighbor makes negative sense, unless you note that it has kept Epstein out of the news, despite forthcoming financial and other disclosures in civil suits. Senator Ron Wyden is hot on the financial trail, much as the financial trail brought down Al Capone, and it's to note that there have been some "no trial, no publicity" settlements by banks.

OutOfHere

In the scope of things, this one is relatively harmless. Consider how many people even remember the Gulf of America name. These things distract from the real damage done by the administration, e.g. by killing offshore wind energy projects using taxpayer money, accelerating CO2 emission, and lowering drinking water purity and pollution standards. Next up, he renames the Atlantic Ocean to Ocean of the Americas.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495947

josefritzishere

I never thought of Sundar Pichai as a loser before but ... here we are.

220hertz

Maybe this was Google being cheeky for once. When I, a Canadian, dragged over the map, the Lake remained Lake Ontario. When I search for Lake America, the pin sets itself directly over the same lake with the text "Lake America: The smallest of the five great lakes." I hope this was intentional.

tomasphan

"Oops our Google Maps team is on vacation, an intern messed up the lake names microservice called "Lacus" and it is currently unavailable for changes. It will take the Google Maps team 2 years to make this change." Thats how they could have pushed back against a dictator. Every finger you give him is a hand you lose.

I_complete_me

My mnemonic for remembering the Great Lakes used to be HOMES. I've updated it to HAMES.

kazinator

If you can't be magnanimous, be maganymous. Invent maganyms for places.

canada_dry

The Gov't of Canada uses google maps and apparently don't have the country setting that dictates which version of Lake Ontario/America users see - so Canadians using their site get the US (Lake America). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/google-updates-maps-lake-onta... Having experienced fed gov't IT projects I'm guessing it'll take 6-8 weeks and cost $500K-$750K to update that setting. /s