The Huge, Unseen Operation Behind the Accuracy of Google Maps

If you&#x27;re fascinated by maps and digital cartography and haven&#x27;t done so yet, do check out OpenStreetMap! It&#x27;s competitive to Bing, HERE, etc. but everything is open, and the data is yours to play with.<p>There are projects based on OSM for routing, geo search, map editing, etc. that are also free. Definitely a lot of room for both programmers and non-programmers to contribute.<p><a href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Main_Page</a>

This is a very detailed article. Most people do not appreciate how much work is put into building these digital maps, so it is great to see these kinds of articles.<p>While not as detailed, for contrast I want to post how Nokia&#x27;s HERE maps builds their maps.<p><a href="http://360.here.com/2014/11/17/made-usa-people-fargo-make-maps/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;360.here.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;made-usa-people-fargo-make-ma...</a><p>That is from the company blog. It shows a couple of our tools, but not nearly all. I work for HERE maps and my opinion is my own.<p>I just thought that people might be interested in how other companies like HERE build maps. Despite all the automation (at both google and HERE), it is still a human intensive process and there are people on the other end making it as correct as can be. Also, I can&#x27;t go beyond what is written on the public blog as I am not a company spokesperson.

Google Map&#x27;s data keeps getting better and better, they now have lane warnings (e.g. &quot;right two lanes,&quot; etc) and traffic warnings with the offering to re-route (if they can find a quicker route). Although Google Map constantly offering to re-route me onto a slower route is a little odd (e.g. &quot;want to re-route? It will be a 5 minute longer trip!&quot;).<p>That all being said, while Google Maps as a data source is amazing, Google Maps as an app and or web-site has a lot to be desired. Up until a few versions ago they had a way to add &quot;My Places&quot; but no way to actually access those places from the app (what?!). They have no search history (still, today), they do have suggestions but they are just somewhat useful, they have no compass (got removed), plus they went all &quot;minimalist&quot; and hide all the UI elements (and removed things like offline maps, for nearly a year).<p>I&#x27;ve actually been forced to stop using Google Maps as GPS as the app keeps closing during navigation and when re-opened it has &quot;forgotten&quot; what I was navigating to or previously searched for. So now I am forced, mid-journey to exit the freeway just to re-open Google Maps, re-search for my destination, and then re-start navigation just hoping it won&#x27;t re-close-randomly before I get there...<p>It doesn&#x27;t crash. It just closes. It is just gone. Like &quot;poof.&quot; Then of course the phone goes into standby as nothing is keeping the screen on. At least if it had search history the situation MIGHT be recoverable, but nope...

I worked as a contractor in Kirkland on this project for about a year.<p>Just for context, the first image with the red and green dots--- each dot represents a 360-degree &quot;street view&quot; image. While consumers only get half-a-dozen a block, the operators got access to all of them. (Green are HD, red are normal def.) It was really useful for verifying that businesses had closed because the streetview dots also had the exact time that they were taken.<p>There was also deeplinking in Atlas to a specific dot and direction vector. So when I was submitting a change to a business, I could link to the exact sign that I saw to prove that &quot;Mama&#x27;s Teriyaki is on _that_ corner&quot;, which helped whoever QA&#x27;d my change.<p>It was a great first job out of college given that my degree wasn&#x27;t very relevant to anything. (A lot of my coworkers in the same spot--- young, a degree that wasn&#x27;t too useful, trying to find anything to do.) Out of the 400 contractors in that first Kirkland &quot;class&quot;, I see tons of them around the Seattle tech industry now. It&#x27;s been a surprisingly good network to have.<p>At the end of the day it was still data-entry &#x2F; data-validation, and mind-numbingly boring.

It&#x27;s wonderful what Google are doing with Google Maps, but I can&#x27;t help but wish these maps were open to use by their competitors.<p>Imagine a world where all the effort Google, Apple, Microsoft and Nokia put into their maps all went into OpenStreetMap instead.

Their screen capture of the Seattle Center area is particularly amusing given that their competitor Apple Maps still hasn&#x27;t figured out:<p>1. That Broad St no longer exists for a significant portion of its length.<p>2. That Mercer St has been two-way for months now.<p>This is <i>the</i> major east-west road in that area, and they can&#x27;t even get that right.<p>Yes, I&#x27;ve reported it regularly for months now.

They started Ground Truth when I was there and it really opened my eyes to just how &quot;broken&quot; a lot of map data sources were at the time. Something I considered to be a &#x27;solved&#x27; problem (take aerial photograph, pull out streets, poof map!) was no where close to solved.<p>Some folks have said that Ingress, the Android and now iOS, real world geo game. Was in part an exercise in data collecting. Get people to photograph land marks in the real world to make &quot;portals&quot; while collecting GPS data associated with public landmarks for maps. And then use that data to localize things in satellite imagery, etc.<p>Makes for an interesting data set.

It&#x27;s little wonder that Google Maps is such an amazing application given all the time, intelligence, resources and just the sheer commitment Google&#x27;s shown to it.<p>I know business considerations are what they are and often independent from others, but nothing shook my belief in Apple&#x27;s commitment to quality as a defining principle more than the decision to replace Google Maps with Apple&#x27;s own half-baked beta offering. Does anyone think they&#x27;ll ever give maps &amp; cartography the kind of attention to detail that Google&#x27;s given it?

Another similar article appeared two years ago:<p>How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything<p><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-google-builds-its-maps-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-everything/261913/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2012&#x2F;09&#x2F;how-go...</a><p>I think most interesting point is not covered in either of them: How much of this effort devoted towards human curation? The numbers are believed to be ~1100 full time employees and 6000 contract workers[1]. These are huge numbers compared to most competitors in the market. Assuming each correction to a map can take 15 mins on average, you can easily make 100,000 corrections a day. Again, assuming there are top 2000 cities in the world where most of the queries originates, this is about 100 corrections per city per day. This would guarantee Google maps best of the best freshness, precision and recall on most metrics. With about 10X-20X larger curation force plus algo engineering, likes of Apple or HERE have no chance. In a way this also shows Google&#x27;s leadership wisdom. Maps are <i>the</i> most important thing on mobile and even on web. Most companies don&#x27;t get this and provide minuscule budgets citing no potential revenues (for instance Ballmer cancelled Street View like effort at Microsoft). By the time they wake - if they wake up - it would be to only find that they have been outrun by such a huge gap that even a decade won&#x27;t be enough to catch up.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/to-do-what-google-does-in-maps-apple-would-have-to-hire-7000-people-2012-6" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;to-do-what-google-does-in-map...</a>

difficult to imagine why apple would have even attempted to get into this space ... they must realize they can only be a second rate player. maybe that&#x27;s good enough for them? doesn&#x27;t fit with their story&#x2F;ethos though

St. Louis streetwalker serial killer, Maury Travis, sent the local newspaper a computer generated map giving the intersection where he left a body.<p>Investigators determined that web-based mapping software Expedia was used--based on symbols used to mark highways and such--ruling out Mapquest, Yahoo, and others.<p>A single person had clicked on that intersection in Expedia in the 5 days before the map was received by the newspaper. They traced the person presumably using the IP address.<p>This was back in 2001.<p>It&#x27;s odd that we still have unsolved street crime given that everyone today carries a tracking device sending back real-time geolocation data.

There was a great talk on this at Google I&#x2F;O 2013. Recording here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsbLEtS0uls" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FsbLEtS0uls</a>

I dunno, there&#x27;s been a Starbucks open a couple blocks from me for six months now. Wasn&#x27;t on Google Maps until I went and added it myself!

Google maps is amazing. I was on my way to Detroit Airport, I live about 1.5hours away. Anyways, I wanted to double check directions so I used google maps, and it came up with directions that were going to take me 2 hours. I laughed thinking, &#x27;oh technology, 2 steps forward, 1 step back&#x27;. So I drove down the way I already knew and was just double checking. With twenty minutes left in the drive, theres a deadstop traffic jam. Highway is closed. Turns out entire highways flooded in Detroit around 6-7am, and when I googled directions around 830am, google knew not to go that way, but I didn&#x27;t. Made it to the airport 3 hours later, with a flight 6 hours after that. I had never been so impressed with google maps before this though. How did it know not to go that way so fast? I literally just drove right into it no warning or detour signs.

And yet, when I want to go from SFO to Cupertino, it absolutely refuses to offer taking 380 to 280, even when it is 10 to 15 minutes faster according to Google itself.<p>Apparently they still haven&#x27;t fixed the whole &quot;we have to go directly away from the destination for a little while&quot; problem.

&gt; The majority of buildings in the U.S. are now on Google Maps.<p>I doubt this. Out of curiosity I looked at my family&#x27;s farm and Google Maps is missing most of our outbuildings. More generally I&#x27;m sure that they come up short on backyard sheds, pool buildings, structures in dense forests, etc.

An interesting anecdote: the &quot;promenade claude lévi-strauss&quot; is a new street in Paris (around 1 year old, pedestrian only). It doesn&#x27;t exist in Google Maps yet, which make Uber fail when you try to go there as Uber rely on google maps. (many people might want to go there, as it is now where all the paris urban planning administration is. I had to for a permit.)<p>Actually last I tried Uber&#x2F;Google Maps sent you at the directly opposite corner of Paris, to the Quai Branly Museum, probably because there is something related to the anthropologist there (?).<p>Both Apple Maps and more interestingly the crowd sourced OpenStreetMap know about the &quot;promenade&quot;. I&#x27;m curious to see how long it will take Google to discover this new street.

After relying on Google Maps a lot for many years living in the US, I have (maybe unsurprisingly) noticed that it doesn&#x27;t work nearly as well in Europe. As in, I&#x27;d zoom in on central Stockholm and search for something common, like the name of a restaurant, and Maps would promptly swoosh me to Nicaragua where it found a place with that name. It&#x27;s doing stuff like this so often that I rarely use it anymore.

This article shows that Waze&#x27;s method of crowd sourcing maps is the right way to go. Waze is able to have realtime detailed information about every street, building, directions, etc. including all the details that were discussed in the article + much more (e.g. future road changes), and most importantly it does that in a fraction of the cost. Now it seems that the 1.3B that Google paid for it is probably a bargain

Despite all of Google&#x27; effort, they still rely too much on USGS published maps. For example, just 6 miles from the GooglePlex is a road in Newark with a gate [1], but Google doesn&#x27;t know you can&#x27;t drive on it.<p>They&#x27;re doing a good thing, but unless you can see that Google has driven the route and has published street view, you can&#x27;t entirely trust them.<p>[1] 37.515696 -122.050873

So they have speed limit information? It would be handy if you could have that information on the navigation screen, maybe even with a warning when you exceed it.

I&#x27;m still waiting for smartphones to be more fully crowd sourced into maps. I badly want real-time traffic data to come from smartphones.

Anyone have resources for mitigating the web map zoom level inaccuracy bug? I guess I know this only as the OSM bug, but it is the reason web mapping like OSM and Google Maps isn&#x27;t used much by true GIS analysis. You can see this most easily by having your GPS on with your phone and using Google Maps on the web. When you zoom out your location accuracy decreases the more zoomed out you are. This doesn&#x27;t seem to happen on the Maps app on my phone.