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The term "trap street" refers to fake roads and other fictional destinations like Argleton that are intentionally sprinkled on a map to discourage competitors from plagiarism. In this case, either Google was laying the bait for a competitor (hey, Bing?) or the mystery town was inserted in analog form long ago by Tele Atlas, the Netherlands-based company that supplied Google Maps with its initial framework. The more likely story, though, is that Argleton was an example of a copyright trap, which cartographers have long used to catch would-be thieves from stealing their hard work.
What is a trap street software#
The town never existed anywhere other than cyberspace, where it was represented visually by one of Google's teardrop-shaped pins.Īt the time, Google said Argleton's inclusion in its mapping software was the result of human error, and the "mistake" was soon deleted.
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There were no buildings, street signs, or townspeople - just open fields of untouched grass. If you drove through the English countryside trying to find Argleton, you'd quickly find yourself confused and lost. A cursory online search for the town was replete with websites for businesses, real estate listings, local weather, and even ways to find yourself a hot Friday-night date. As recently as 2009, in the rural English county of Lancashire, a small town called Argleton could easily be found on Google Maps, just east of the A59 motorway.