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Google also uses (used?) a great deal of human judgment in Maps (note: these sources are a few years old now) [1, 2]. [1] https://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-

by ncdev 9y ago

Google also uses (used?) a great deal of human judgment in Maps (note: these sources are a few years old now) [1, 2]. [1] https://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-maps-ground-truth/ https://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-maps-ground-truth/ [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-google-builds-its-maps-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-everything/261913/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-g...

maxerickson 9y ago
Yeah, here the buildings quickly disappear outside of dense areas. Which could be a result of prioritizing the denser areas with an automated system, but there's lots of missing buildings in the built up areas too.
splonk 9y ago
I think people generally wildly underestimate the scope and impact of Ground Truth (or are entirely ignorant of it). Back when Apple Maps launched (and probably just after GT had been publicly acknowledged), I had a chat with an Apple journalist, and basically told him that Apple had no idea what they were in for. They'd fix the obvious big public bugs (turning off of highway overpasses) easily enough, but they would remain way behind on data quality. Back then Google was spending something like a billion dollars a year for GT and Street View alone, which is a massive organization that Apple just didn't have, wasn't likely to build, and couldn't license. Add to that a huge lead in satellite imagery, custom flyover data, business data from web search, customer feedback from their incumbent maps app, and I just didn't see any way that Apple was going to come even close to Google's map quality in the next several years. Basically the only question to me was if/how quickly they'd reach "good enough" status for their users to avoid tarnishing their brand. Story time: Back before GT was used widely, I think some street addresses were placed by just linearly interpolating them along the road. Charleston and Rengstorff are a bit weird near the Google campus, so for a while people looking for directions to the shopping center on the other side of the freeway would find themselves getting directed (embarrassingly!) to the Google Maps building, with its big red pin in front reminding them how they'd been led astray. After giving directions to these lost souls one too many times, I got annoyed enough to rant to someone about how terrible the data was. He agreed, took me over to a what I now know must have been a GT operator, got it fixed, and told me it would be live within a month. So I got to say that I'd personally served some Maps traffic, and reduced load on a low performance server as well (my QPS is pathetic).
pas 9y ago
I was surprised how the post yammered on about extracting data from street view .. when a lot of data is added by humans (Local Guides) and by business owners themselves.

by ncdev 9y ago

maxerickson 9y ago

Yeah, here the buildings quickly disappear outside of dense areas. Which could be a result of prioritizing the denser areas with an automated system, but there's lots of missing buildings in the built up areas too.

splonk 9y ago

I think people generally wildly underestimate the scope and impact of Ground Truth (or are entirely ignorant of it). Back when Apple Maps launched (and probably just after GT had been publicly acknowledged), I had a chat with an Apple journalist, and basically told him that Apple had no idea what they were in for. They'd fix the obvious big public bugs (turning off of highway overpasses) easily enough, but they would remain way behind on data quality. Back then Google was spending something like a billion dollars a year for GT and Street View alone, which is a massive organization that Apple just didn't have, wasn't likely to build, and couldn't license. Add to that a huge lead in satellite imagery, custom flyover data, business data from web search, customer feedback from their incumbent maps app, and I just didn't see any way that Apple was going to come even close to Google's map quality in the next several years. Basically the only question to me was if/how quickly they'd reach "good enough" status for their users to avoid tarnishing their brand. Story time: Back before GT was used widely, I think some street addresses were placed by just linearly interpolating them along the road. Charleston and Rengstorff are a bit weird near the Google campus, so for a while people looking for directions to the shopping center on the other side of the freeway would find themselves getting directed (embarrassingly!) to the Google Maps building, with its big red pin in front reminding them how they'd been led astray. After giving directions to these lost souls one too many times, I got annoyed enough to rant to someone about how terrible the data was. He agreed, took me over to a what I now know must have been a GT operator, got it fixed, and told me it would be live within a month. So I got to say that I'd personally served some Maps traffic, and reduced load on a low performance server as well (my QPS is pathetic).

pas 9y ago

I was surprised how the post yammered on about extracting data from street view .. when a lot of data is added by humans (Local Guides) and by business owners themselves.