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Google Opens Up Street View Archives From 2007 To Today
mpicpp (3454017) writes with news that Google is publishing all Street View imagery back to 2007. Quoting Ars: "The feature hasn't rolled out to many accounts yet, but it looks like a small, draggable window will be added to the Street View interface. Just move the time slider around and you'll be able to jump through past images. Granted, Street View has only been around for a few years, so the archives only go back to 2007. A few of the events Google suggests browsing through are the building of One World Trade Center and the destruction and rebuilding of Onagawa, Japan after the 2011 earthquake. Besides being really cool, the move will save Google from having to choose a canonical Street View image for every location. If the current image is blacked-out or wrong in some way, you can just click back to the previous one."
As with most Google roll outs they come in stages. I can't view these archives yet.
We have a lovely convention centre here in Vancouver, built and opened for the 2010 Olympics. In Bing maps unfortunately it is still at the piling stage :(
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
This has been available on Google earth for years. It's just new to Google Maps. The most useful aspect of this is if you're buying a house. You can look back at past records to see just how old that swimming pool really is... or did the owner really build that garage last year?
It's the opposite of handy if you're selling however ;-)
Google is publishing more information! And some people might use that for EVIL! Oh no!
So when are they going to update the actual MAPs themselves?
My area has changed CONSIDERABLY in the past 10 years alone.
There are whole new housing sections, entire section of town knocked to dust, both of my schools knocked down, new schools built, whole shopping district, hotels and various eateries.
I can still see my childhood in Google Maps, in another town over. My childhood! THAT IS OLDER THAN GOOGLE MAPS. (27)
And it's not like it is just some random crappy little town either (ish...). It is a middle-tier port town with fairly famous history of people (mainly literature), football club and fairly popular horse racing as well. Ayr, Scotland if you are wondering.
Besides, it is the main road that is the biggest problem since it is a major road network in Scotland that goes to Glasgow. And that area is SO different.
That is probably one of the areas that has changed most in fact.
Hit this and pop in to street view after looking around at the general layout. Main Ayr Roundabout
And it doesn't just apply to here, I've seen loads of other places with barely a change. Even hugely popular places.
Although they do seem to have Blackpool updated. That went through a massive change by them adding a whole artificial shoreline to protect against the worsening weather. And damn does it look pretty. Now if only they can fix the scummy people problems it can become glorious again.
How hard can it be to get updated visuals?
I mean, I can find an aerial photography company that has 2010 visuals of the whole country. Real nice ones as well from what I remember.
And this was pre-cheap Google that cutback SO much stuff that probably barely made a dent on their servers and could have likely been rolled on to less servers that were shared. ("but we don't want a slow Google" they say as Gmails loading got worse somehow)
Does 20% time even exist any more? Does x% time even exist? Or did they just destroy personal project experimentation entirely to become a fully evil company? (even Microsoft aren't that cruel, their R&D and dev communities are pretty decent, and actually exist now)
Oh Google, what happened to you? They even cut things they could have easily made money off of like iGoogle. Instead they replaced it with Now, a hilariously awful replacement at that. Tablets, they're the future! Ugh. (and I say that even though I have one)
Then Google will record every aspect of daily life, everywhere.
Here we are worried about the NSA monitoring our virtual lives, while Google is recording meatspace.
Widespread outages for every Google service starting at 2pm eastern today.
A few weeks back I clicked on a hyperlink into Street View from an old email and discovered that it opened up a view into an earlier set of imagery than the current default imagery for that same location. So glad, but not surprised, that Google wasn't throwing away the old coverage when it did updates. This isn't working for me yet (even on the links in the Google Blog announcement), but glad to see it has gone public with a means to explore it.
burn.
What this means to me is that on a certain corner in downtown Sacramento there is a Street View photo of me on my motorcycle showing my license plate but obfuscating the engine block embarrassing both Google engineers at the weakness of the despicable AI they use to hide identifiable features. If I had known that that damned car with the cameras mounted on top would be on the street at the exact same time I would be at that intersection, I would have waited a couple minutes. Fortunately, I obfuscated my own face by wearing a full-face helmet.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Google Maps already has so many major problems that it just doesn't make sense to go on a rampage adding more half-baked features. I really miss being able to drag the little guy to the map to get to street view. Now, that doesn't work. Only a Republican would think adding features to something you can't get to is the right thing to do. Seriously, fix getting to street view before adding features. It's asinine of them to do this.
its not really broken is it? They just changed the way it worked so now you tap on the map where you want to get the street view option instead of having to drag some weird icon from the top left corner. I know that it was nice and easy once you knew what that man was, but it was not exactly intuitive for nooblets. Now when ever you click anywhere on the map it brings up a little box with the streetview here button in it.
But hey, your right, Google should never be allowed to change user interface stuff, ever.
I dont read
There isn't just Street View in Google! Google Canal View went live about 5 months ago, with the entirety of Venice, North Italy. One must wonder if a true "time slider" could be added there, using old b&w photography and paintings, dating back as far as the renaissance era? After all, the same houses and palaces, which Shakespeare Oxenford saw, still stand there, even if modified somewhat. As an added bonus, Venice has always been depicted by so many artists, being considered romantic and whatnot, thereby proving a lot of "raw footage" from the past centuries. Those could be mapped geo-spatially into the Street View /Canal View framework.
I want to see people's faces and car license plates. If they continue censoring faces, then I'm not interested in Google Street View.