How Google Builds Its Maps (opens in new tab)

A lot of people under estimate the investment Google has made in their maps product. That we've got two companies doing that (Apple and Google) is a bit mind boggling.

> An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps.

Meanwhile, there is another program to build the world's best maps, which is quite the opposite of secretive, involves hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world, offers public dumps under a free license, and has already outperformed Google for some areas and use cases: http://www.openstreetmap.org/

After reading this article, I realize now that Watson was this cute thing IBM was working on that they thought was novel, while Google was building machines that think, collaborate and formulate, period. They don't just answer questions: they take data and turn it into something we know how to breeze through.

I am truly astounded by how quickly we are accelerating through this information era.

NAVTEQ has been doing this for 15 years. Google learned it from being their customer for much of that time. But of course they get the credit.

I work for a company in the telecommunications space. We've talked to several car companies about integrating 4g into their on board computers. I'm really excited for this update. I suppose I haven't really noticed how much better navigation has improved until a few weeks ago. Recently I purchased an 09 infiniti with full tech package. The thing that took me back, was how terrible the navigation system has been inside of Boston (a very complex area). I can't remember the last time Google maps has told me something wrong, but this stale nav system consistently get's confused about 1 way streets etc.

What i'd LOVE to see is for Nissan to throw away its custom OS, and replace it with Android... along with that I want google maps (instead of whatever Nissan is licensing). Plus it would be nice to download apps for my car such as a better mileage tracker etc.

Google are only a small part of the spatial data capture world. They provide amazing access to a few datasets and completely ignore others. Location searches are laughably bad unless you are looking for a hotel. They do not even come close to providing comprehensive topographic mapping.

I've always thought that the real money in mobile comes from very accurate map data, and very accurate personal position data. that way when you're walking around town, you can 'ask' your phone for directions to eat/shop/whatever, and it can give you a great recommendation ( for a price to local restaurants ). I asked Eric Schmidt if this was a powerful motivator behind the android acquisition, as at the time it seemed like a natural fit, and surprisingly he did not say no. And yes I know that Android was bought 'on a whim, gut instinct' but this is the perfect use case for it.

Of all Google's products, Maps is the one I appreciate the most. It got lots of smart features, it's fast, it's got great coverage, and it's easy to use. Truly great work.

If you are a cartographile, I recommend watching The Beauty of Maps and Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession, two four-part BBC documentaries:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s2w83

Don't miss this part:

'Not to detour too much, but what you see above is just the beginning of how Google is going to use Street View imagery. Think of them as the early web crawlers (remember those?) going out in the world, looking for the words on pages. That's what Street View is doing. One of its first uses is finding street signs (and addresses) so that Google's maps can better understand the logic of human transportation systems. But as computer vision and OCR improve, any word that is visible from a road will become a part of Google's index of the physical world. Later in the day, Google Maps VP Brian McClendon put it like this: "We can actually organize the world's physical written information if we can OCR it and place it," McClendon said. "We use that to create our maps right now by extracting street names and addresses, but there is a lot more there." More like what? "We already have what we call 'view codes' for 6 million businesses and 20 million addresses, where we know exactly what we're looking at," McClendon continued. "We're able to use logo matching and find out where are the Kentucky Fried Chicken signs... We're able to identify and make a semantic understanding of all the pixels we've acquired. That's fundamental to what we do."'

That is scary. They could read license plates and tie them to addresses. They could read bumper stickers and determine your politics, whether your kid was an honor student at what school, etc.

Live edits of OpenStreetMap http://live.openstreetmap.fr/

> Google is locked in a battle with the world's largest company, Apple

Wait, what? By what measure?

Phew! I worked in one of Google's data-entry offices for the GT team. I've left, but now I can shoot this article to people to actually describe what I did.

basically, they don't care to show their technology, because there is no way another company can develop their technology in the short time, and if some company adventures on it, when they reach google technology, google will be far, far beyond them.

now, that's what i call competitive advantage.

You really don't appreciate how much great data Google have in their maps until you try to use anything else. Apple have a lot of work to do to get iOS 6 maps on-par (for instance, I still haven't managed to do a successful search here in Japan - I have to carry around an Android phone for maps and train directions)