For a while, a fictional city appeared on Google Maps for no apparent reason!

The nonexistent settlement, called “Argleton,” was located just east of the civil parish of Aughton in West Lancashire, England. In reality the area is just a bunch of empty fields. The supposed town was finally removed from Google Maps and Earth in January 2010 not just because it didn’t exist, but because many online information services were mistakenly listing addresses within the postage zones as being located in Argleton! 

It is not known for certain why or how Argleton began - it was most likely a mistake by a programmer at Tele Atlas, the Dutch company that provides all the information for Google’s map database. However, Argleton briefly became quite a cultural phenomenon. A year after its discovery in 2008, it was receiving around 249,000 hits on Google and had become a fairly popular hashtag on Twitter!

at 04:03