Argleton the town that only exists on Google Maps
Unusual and weird stories are always viral because it is simply the nature of human behavior to seek the unusual and odd in life. Many people have searched this morning for a town called “Argleton” on Google Maps and got a match to a small village just off the A59 near Ormskirk, Lancashire, United Kingdom. However, Argleton doesn’t actually exist.
Mike Nolan was the first to notice this anomaly about a year ago and wrote about it in his blog. He works as head of web services at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk. All Google is saying is that they got their data from Tele Atlas and Tele Atlas spokesman added “I really can’t explain why these anomalies get into our database.”
The thing to notice here is that Google doesn’t even care to fix the problem. They have known about it for long time but I believe the idea in the beginning was to create a buzz. The blogosphere and twitter are already flooded with information about Argleton: the imaginary town created by Google Maps. Some people said that the name Argleton is an anagram of “NOT REAL G” referring to Not Real Google