Argleton, the "phantom" settlement, which appears only on Google Maps and Google Earth, does not exist in reality. When go off the A59 road and enter into a civil parish in West Lancashire called Ogton, you should come across this town, but instead, you can only see the meadows? Data from Google is used for other online services, and thus you get a real postal code L39 for Arglton. This area appears in a variety of real estate listings, employment centers and even in the weather forecasts. Those people, companies and the services are actually real (i.e. those companies exist in reality), but in a different location in the area. On 30th January 2010, this village was removed from Google Maps, but it can still be seen on Google's Street View application, as well as on Google maps. It is enough to enter a search term "Argleton".
This was first noticed by Mike Nolan, head of internet services at the nearby Edge Hill University, and he wrote this on his blog on September 2008. In early 2009, further investigation was conducted by Nolan’s colleague, Roy Bayfield, who walked the area to see if there is something special about it. Bayfield later wrote about it on his blog, and noted that there is nothing strange or unusual in the area and that there is no that place ... but ... on Google you can clearly see that city ... In November 2009, the story of "non-existent city" reached global popularity. In December 2009, Google searches for the term Argleton had approximately 249,000 results, and appeared in the internet domain argleton.com (with a message on the website: "What the hell are they talking about? We, the citizens Argleton exist! Here we are!) Also, argleton-village.co.uk (site-parody that describes the history of the city, famous residents, and current events in the fictional town) used this opportunity to make a profit. There were even T-shirts with the inscription: "I visited Argleton, and all I got was this T-shirt!
Look at the place where the city should be
One possible explanation for the presence Argleton is that it was intentionally added as a trap for the copyrights. It has been perceived that the word "Argle" sounds almost like "Google", while the name is also an anagram for "Not Large" and "Not real G", with the letter G, which clearly is associated with Google. To complicate it all, another theory was released later. It is that Argleton was wrongly spelled and that it should have been Aughton, despite the fact that both cities appear on the map next to each other. Professor Danny Dorling, President of the cartographer association, said that the city is actually nothing more than harmless error by the software authors.
The Google spokesman said: "While the vast majority of these data is correct, there can sometimes come to mistakes," and encouraged users to report any mistakes directly to them. Data for Google maps is obtained from the Dutch Tele Atlas. They were unable to explain how such error occurred, but that they will correct it instantly.
source: wikipedia.org
