[OC] A discovery of businesses located on the sea… according to Google Map.

Good day to you all, my name is Joseph, a want to be data analyst, here to share a discovery I made while scraping Google Map for my job hunt.

When I was doing EDA on data I collected, I noticed that some businesses are not on land; after further investigations, it turns out that almost 3% of businesses are on the sea; after analyzing those 3%, I found out that 73% of them share the same geo-coordinate, i.e. [46.423669, -129.9427086].

This discovery made me wonder, is that the coordinate that Google default to when an invalid input is given?

Were the other randomly scattered businesses on the sea intentionally put there?

I tried to contact a few journalists to help in the uncovering of this mystery… but no one showed any interest; if you want, you can share it, as long as a tiny attribution is made.

Here are some resources:
– Data I scraped and used to generate the plot, both in CSV and Parquet:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rCXC7h1kgVbcUA0Bu5yXj4NGUbqst2Cl?usp=sharing
– Tools I used:
Selenium Base, Pandas/Polars, Plotly Express, Jupyter Lab.
– Interactive plot:
https://josephelhaddad.github.io/plotly/b_in_sea2
– Blog post I made on my ugly website:
https://josephelhaddad.github.io/20250109T202901–google-map-plan__note.html

You can DM or leave a comment if you wish to investigate this together, ask me a question, give me and advice, or to tell me how unpleasing is my website.

PS: This is my first post, but it might also be my last… please be gentle to this data Hobbit.
PPS: I hope I didn't violate any rules.