Just What IS Google Thinking Anyway?
Written by Chad on August 6th, 2008Well, first off we have Frank and his post about Google telling it’s people when the street view vehicle is coming by.. and some dork asking his girl to marry him (he must not know that most public announcements of “marry me” never get a yes).
Then James counters with his post about Google ruining street view. He does have some points, and some good counter points get raised. But in my opinion.. I don’t really see street view being useful past the initial “wow! look at that!” stage. I have not really used or looked at street view since it first came out, I have not seen anyone make any really amazing uses of it as well. What you find 97% of the time is people posting about a cat they saw, someone doing something to someone else, someone taking a leak down a back alley.. all really vanilla stuff to be honest.
But for my post… I am just wondering what Google is thinking (they have the “More money than brains” syndrome I think.. though in this case you switch storage for money. Some friends of mine in Australia are just amazed that google finds a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.. worthy of having street views of it.
Here you can see the road in the middle of nowhere, nothing around but trees and dirt roads.
And here is the street view of said middle-of-newhere road.
So, you just have to wonder just how many TB’s of imagery data there are showing trees in detail.
6
AM
Who but Google is going to photograph these trees?
6
AM
I find it pretty useful when going to somewhere I’ve never been before.
Since I navigate visually, I can memorize the route by looking at the turns as if I’m driving it and I have a lot less trouble than if I relied on my brain the imagine the route.
7
AM
Do you really not get this? Google wants to drop their data providers. They do this by collecting all the data themselves — only they don’t have to redrive it if they decide they want to collect more data, they just look into their archives and recollect it themselves. In 5 years, they’ll have no more need of TeleAtlas or Navteq for anything but the most remote areas: they’ll have extracted the data from all of the Streetview imagery, and have no more need to pay licensing fees.
7
AM
Sorry, my days are filled more with “How can I get access to the online paper?” than GIS related questions.
But that does make sense, and no, did not think of that (even though I have been doing it for OpenStreetMap).
7
PM
Actually, it’s an extension from “Can I see my house?”. Now it’s “Want to see where I went on my holidays?” Or you can do “So THAT’s what Wiluna really looks like!” Not that one might want to more than once.
In all seriousness, I went trawling around the back of nowhere in Western Australia for work purposes yesterday - found a track / road that was covered where I wanted some geology and had little imagery. It worked sort of, but lacked detail (understandable)
8
AM
Were you able to find the correct tree then Radhock?
Sorry, part of my brain is still going WTF?