February 7, 2026
Map drama: fries vs banks vs Greenland
72M Points of Interest
72 million places, one big map: Now the internet argues over McDonald’s math and Greenland’s size
TLDR: Overture dropped a global dataset of 72 million places with new labels for status and brands. Commenters loved the walkthrough but clashed over suspicious brand counts (Citibank > McDonald’s?) and the Mercator map that inflates Greenland—highlighting how data quality and map choices shape what we think we see.
Map geeks got a feast: Overture’s Places now lists 72,444,739 spots worldwide — cafes, banks, parks — plus fresh labels for operating status, basic category, and brand taxonomy. The author flexed a monster PC, then used DuckDB (a simple local database) and QGIS to explore. The crowd was split: fans loved the hand‑holding walkthrough and “cool maps,” while critics sharpened their knives.
The brand-count brawl stole the show. Readers balked at claims like more Citibank branches than McDonald’s, and 56,000 “Wildberries” stores for a mostly online retailer. Memes flew: “Drive‑thru finance,” “McBank’s on every corner.” Others urged patience — early datasets mislabel brands — and called for a brand sanity check, not a pile‑on.
Then the projection war kicked off. Why use Mercator, the map style that makes Greenland look huge? Geography nerds demanded fair‑area views; pragmatists said web tools default to Mercator, and it’s fine for quick visuals. Whatever your camp, the drop is big and fleeting: releases vanish after ~60 days. People are already syncing the 7.2GB bundle from Overture Labs.
Key Points
- •Overture Maps’ Places dataset contains 72,444,739 POI records as of the January release.
- •Recent schema additions include operating status and confidence (September), basic category (October), and taxonomy (December).
- •The latest release (2026-01-21.0) was downloaded from Amazon S3 using AWS CLI, yielding eight Parquet files totaling 7.2 GB.
- •DuckDB v1.4.3 with multiple extensions (H3, JSON, Lindel, Parquet, Spatial) was used to query and verify dataset counts.
- •Maps were rendered in QGIS 3.44 with Tile+ and HCMGIS plugins adding Bing and Esri basemaps; QGIS sees ~15M launches per month.