Hello everyone! It's time for another detailed update regarding LGR. A lot has happened over the last few weeks – both visibly for you and deep in the site's code.
First of all, the most important thing: A huge thank you! Our database has now grown to over 360,000 profiles. This is an absolute dream come true for me. The fact that this site, which I once started as a small side project, is now being used so intensively by so many people is simply fantastic. I have a lot of fun continuing to develop LGR for you!
Here is an overview of the most important changes and challenges of recent times:
1. New Google Maps Categories Integrated
Google recently cleaned up its contribution categories a bit. The "Facts checked" category was merged into "Answers". In return, Google introduced two completely new categories. I immediately integrated one of them – Incident reports – into LGR. You can now track your statistics for this in your profile as usual.
2. Smart Syncs: Ready for 1 Million Profiles
I am constantly optimizing the site. Such a rapidly growing platform brings daily challenges and ties up a lot of capacity (which is why I unfortunately often don't have the time to build in new features as quickly as I would like).
Previously, I updated every accessible profile every single day and saved a snapshot. With over 360,000 profiles, this cost an insane amount of computing power and storage space: We currently have 46,786,423 snapshots in the database, taking up about 8 GB. That might sound manageable, but the storage requirement grows exponentially with increasing user numbers.
That's why I completely reworked the profile update logic: My system now checks whether a profile is active or inactive.
- Active profiles will continue to be updated every day.
- For inactive profiles, the update frequency is gradually reduced to a minimum of once a week.
- As soon as the profile shows activity again, everything is reset and the system updates daily again.
This brings enormous savings in storage space and allows me to update far more profiles overall. With this new logic, I am perfectly equipped to manage 1 million profiles (and more!) on the website in the future. If you are interested in these numbers, feel free to check out the Insights.
3. A Stumbling Block: The New Google Profile ID Problem
Unfortunately, there is also something frustrating to report. For some time now, Google has been offering "custom profiles" where you can choose a custom name and picture. The problem: As soon as you activate this, Google generates a completely new, unique 21-digit profile ID for the Maps profile.
Since my system identifies each profile based on this ID, I cannot technically read from the outside that these two IDs belong to the same person. For LGR, it looks as if the old profile becomes inactive and a new profile appears out of nowhere.
Currently, I don't have a real automated solution for this yet, other than deleting the inactive profiles at some point. However, I am working on a tool to manually merge two profiles so that your history is preserved. Unfortunately, this will be tricky manual work, especially if the profile name also changes. I think it's a real shame that Google does this – a unique ID should always remain unique. Perhaps this was also implemented to make life harder for statistics sites like mine.
Write to Me!
I want to thank every single one of you who uses my site. Do you have comments or questions? Feel free to write me an email! I try to answer everything as best I can.
🤓 Nerd Stats of the Month
For everyone who loves numbers as much as I do, here are a few current data snippets:
- 360,000+ managed Local Guide profiles.
- 46,786,423 saved daily snapshots.
- 8 Gigabytes of pure database storage space (just for the snapshots!).
- Savings through smart syncs: Thousands of unnecessary API calls and gigabytes of storage space saved per month!
Best regards,
Your team from LGR
