I still didn’t know what it was. Went to the headline link and had no idea, typed in “what is this”. Still no idea. I had to read the hn comments to discover it is a search proxy..
Your bio says that you are a programmer at google. That says a lot to how impossible the situation is to most people. Google maps has been telling me bs for years. When I lived in Cyprus, asking directions to a business would often lead to empty lots. I assumed it was caused by competitors sabotaging the database with bogus updates..