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The Geek Behind Google's Takeover of the Map (fastcompany.com)
tedlistens writes: Google's map isn't just a map. It's a living, complex manifestation of the data that billions of users and a team of thousands of engineers and designers feed it every day. The public face of the company's mapping effort is Ed Parsons, a gregarious Briton and geographer who as Google's Geospatial Technologist evangelizes for its mission of organizing the world's geographic information. He also works on building the trust the company needs to make Google Maps and Google Earth more detailed, useful, and increasingly, 3-D and interactive -- what he describes as "a selfie for the planet."
The terrain isn't easy: that mission faces challenges from cartographical purists, hoping to preserve the art of cartography, and the democratic mappers of OpenStreetMap ("it's become almost a parody"); from governments seeking to police sensitive borders; from a host of tech companies fighting over the map business; and from privacy defenders concerned about what Google does with that data. "We're kind of looking at what to do with it. We've got a very rich source of data there, but also one that we have to be very careful of," he says. "Your location on the planet is one of the most sensitive pieces of information that anyone can hold on you."
The terrain isn't easy: that mission faces challenges from cartographical purists, hoping to preserve the art of cartography, and the democratic mappers of OpenStreetMap ("it's become almost a parody"); from governments seeking to police sensitive borders; from a host of tech companies fighting over the map business; and from privacy defenders concerned about what Google does with that data. "We're kind of looking at what to do with it. We've got a very rich source of data there, but also one that we have to be very careful of," he says. "Your location on the planet is one of the most sensitive pieces of information that anyone can hold on you."
How about this? I get that providing more relevant information to me requires storing some location history information. Fine. But let me be in charge of it and able to selectively delete entries, reduce the resolution of the data, or easily erase it altogether. Furthermore, the most difficult thing for Google (another services) seems to be resisting the urge to share all that data with advertisers. I would find it far easier to appreciate what the nerds at Google have done if it was really about the technology the nerds have developed and not yet another excuse to sell us out to advertisers.
I was thinking, I hope they are planning a date figure, so in the future we can see street maps by date and year or decade. In the future it would be interesting to visit not just a place but a year. In the same way that old maps have value because political lines have changed, I hope Google Maps is investing in keeping the older data as the lines change. It would be good to see what Florida was like before it was submerged in water, for example.
Gently reply
As scary as it is that society has so gleefully accepted the near-total abandonment of privacy that Google et. al. represents, it does make for some neat toys. Google Earth is easily my favorite program to kill time with.
I can't wait until 5 years from now when a hacker releases a GE extension that lets you click a house and spy on what's going on inside via the webcam on their unsecured IoT SmartTrashcan.
You need to be euthanized. Take your foul opinion somewhere like stormfront where it's wanted.
An amazing comment, I congratulate you sir...
More use of Plus+Codes! More use of Plus+Codes! Please add forward AND reverse lookups.
https://maps.googleblog.com/20...
Also called Open Location Code http://openlocationcode.com/
This is a great way to mark specific locations to a few meters or to a block or to a metro area. Just provide more digits to the codes to get more accurate.
https://github.com/google/open...
Humans without addresses need an easy way to share their location with sufficient accuracy, but not too much. What3Words has the right idea, but it is proprietary. GPS is completely open, but unuseable by humans.
Some engineers created Plus+Codes which include a resolution as more datum are provided. Google Maps supports plus+codes in the search box, but doesn't output those codes.
There are webapps and multiple language interfaces to libraries. The libraries are Apache licensed. Very business friendly.
https://github.com/google/open... has a nice explanation for why this is useful and needed. There are alternatives, but each is proprietary. Location should be freely available worldwide. Think about places like Nepal or Costa Rica where there either aren't addresses or they use addresses which apply to 50 other homes too? This is a big problem in the undeveloped world (though I wouldn't call Costa Rica or Kathmandu, Nepal undeveloped). There are places in rural USA and Europe where plus+code use would be very helpful too.
All joking aside, the newest version of the Google Maps UI is fucking unusable.
First of all, it's way slower than the "classic" Google Maps was. I zoom, and sit and wait for the goddamn images to load. The fuzzy placeholder images they show are more annoying than just showing no image at all!
Second of all, the search panel is fucked. When I search for something it shows the panel on the left listing the results. The panel takes up 1/3rd of the screen, which is really fucking annoying. But let's say I find what I'm looking for, and so I click on the search result. The map moves to that location. Now that I found what I was looking for, I want to get rid of the search panel since it's so goddamn huge. My first instinct is to click on the large "X" next to the search input. That hides the search panel, but it also clears the search results and the markers on the map, which is really fucking annoying! It turns out you need to click the tiny little arrow button outside of the search panel to close the panel. It's some of the stupidest Millennial/Hipster design I've ever seen. Maybe those shitheads don't realize it, but an "X" icon means close, not clear! And eraser icon is what should be used to indicate an input can be cleared!
Third or all, the goddamn street view dragging never works reliably for me. On my desktop it takes 3 or 4 drags before it finally starts showing the goddamn street view, and it doesn't work at all on my iPad! I should just be able to right-click or press-hold somewhere on the map, select a "Street View Here" menu item and it shows me the closest street view to that point! There shouldn't be any of this goddamn dragging nonsense that Millennial/Hipster designers used!
I don't even bother with Google Maps any more. I just use OpenStreetMap most of the time.
Google Maps used to have a really good, really usable UI. Then a bunch of Millennials/Hipsters must have had their way with it, because like every other piece of software that these people have touched (Firefox, GNOME 3, Windows 8/10, Chrome, Slashdot Beta) it became a fucking awful mess.
Because if he is, he is a massive fuckup. Maps has become steadily less useful over the years, both the Android app and the website. The interfaces are both just pure garbage.
I use maps regularly, but I gave up on using it for navigation/directions beyond point to point and just use my Garmin for multi-stop trips in spite of its crap interface.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Google maps is pretty good, I'll admit. But their driving directions, don't get me started!
Why isn't there an "easy" routing option? Just yesterday maps sent me to an interstate exit going in the opposite direction with an immediate u-turn, instead of the normal, right-hand exit. Maybe the u-turn was a few seconds faster, but it's about 200% more dangerous, it's confusing, and just maddening beyond belief.
Another time, maps took me off a paved road onto a gravel road, over a one-lane bridge almost axle-deep in mud next to a cattle yard, onto a dirt road, and then: back on to the same paved road again, a quarter-mile down the road! The routing algorithm had basically just cut out a bend in the road. It was so outrageous that I imagined Google engineers were actually trying to punk us -- hey, Larry, look, I can't believe that guy actually took the cow path!
OK, don't be evil, I get that. But also, don't make your customers want to throttle your apps with their bare hands.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Your maps continue to get worse and worse. Why can't I rotate a map to orient it on North? Why does the sidebar continually pop out even after I close it? Why is it so difficult to drag the line of a route to a different route without it doubling back on itself?
Hey Ed, how about taking care of the things which are important rather than worrying about shiny. All of the above are why paper maps are still superior in many ways to what you produce.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
You misspelled 'liveleak.com' in your URL bar.
If you want hiking and MTB trail info, OpenStreetMap is much better than Google Maps.
Anyway, why contribute to a closed ecosystem that just exists for Google's profit? OpenStreetMaps data is usable by anyone for any reason (some people have used it for making flight simulators), you can create new applications yourself, download the "raw" data, etc.
"that mission faces challenges from cartographical purists"
I've had a personal experience with this one. I work in mapping at a county level, when we began a GIS (Geographic Information Systems, basically electronic maps) one of the county surveyors was one of the more vocal opponents. He saw it as a threat to his profession, and was afraid of surveying novices screwing up decades of his work. It took a few years but eventually he and other surveyors came around when they realized that we physically couldn't replace them as surveying is highly complex, based on tens of thousands of physical monuments spread through a geographic area in addition to recorded documents. And that it could actually help determine sources of error, such as comparing multiple descriptions on a wider geographic area (surveyors tend to focus on the single property they are surveying, not the one 3 parcels over) and providing an easier source of document information (the GIS links to the assessing system which contains at least a few decades of deed references). Now when some of them stumble across something that is making them scratch their heads they come to us for a second opinion.
OpenSreetMap.org on desktop, and Maps.me on smartphone, as it does not require internet connection.
For viewing locations of Wikipedia articles on the map I use http://ausleuchtung.ch/geo_wik... . It works for different Wikipedia language versions.
Vastly superior to Google's commercial ad-laden pot of tripe.
Please, just shoot the satellite imagery in the summer months in the middle of the day so the shadows aren't so awful. Oh, and can you make the tiles line up with reality instead of being shifted by more than a meter. That would be great, thanks.
The current Google Maps UI is, like most current UI redesign, a major step back when not using a touch device.
I switched to Bing Maps because of it.
most of it is plain old aerial photography (i.e out of planes).
b) A lot of it is done by the government.
...which is the secret behind most of Google's successful projects
I have the impression that what works fine in a building next door to some of Google's servers may not work so well when the packets are delivered by a typical suburban ISP.
Damn Democrats always trying to keep the black man down.
I suspect they never tested it with a real world computer/cell phone or other device.
By real world I mean a device months or even years old, like a lot of people use in the real world.
With a crappy dsl connection or cell phone connection with drops outs, because there is nothing better or because you are paying for it yourself. whereas these airhead web designers have that fastest bestest devices and a damn T1 aqueduct pipeline to the connected to the internet, paid for by their employer.
Sometimes I just prefer something like eBay, because I expect it to hang and hiccup and screw things up, because it's held together with bailing wire and duct tape (physically with their servers, metaphorically with their software). Places like that behave like you expect it to, but somehow, at least, they work enough to be useful.
For me to look up something on Google maps can take 10 minutes.
Not gonna bother anymore.
So, OpenStreetMap is a parody?
How does he explain that?
Google maps is inaccurate. Palestine is missing from the middle east!
As you say, the interface has become pure garbage. But it goes further than that. The push for 3D(who wants that shit?) has turned excellent satellite and aerial pictures into shitty water color like images. They've literally degraded the images to a point that they are useless.
It sucks ass, but instead of falling back, they keep pushing it further into the shitter.
A bud of mine's dad has some farm land. Just so happens he is less than a mile from a lake and public land with trails. A Google user has decided to make a path going onto the farmland, which is also gated and posted as being private land, to make a path going past his dads barn. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage has been done to farm equipment and other property. Google accepts no liability stating some user posted it not them. Google is careless in their mapping process. If they will not police their own users at some point people will get big brother to do it. I strongly suggest Google do it.