24 ms·

I love Street View and cannot believe I'm living in a time and place in history that makes it possible to see such a massive amount of culture and everyday life

by bgraves 15y ago

I love Street View and cannot believe I'm living in a time and place in history that makes it possible to see such a massive amount of culture and everyday life from virtually anywhere in the world. One question I've had since Street View was first released is how does this make business sense for Google? I can see how it relates to Google's stated mission statement ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"). But how can Google justify spending vast amounts of cash on what seems to be a glorified pet project? Is it simply a desire to build the best mapping service, thereby attracting visitors and eventually generating advertising revenue? btw, I'm not trolling or flaming -- it's been a genuine curiosity of mine for years now.

tsycho 15y ago
I don't have an answer to your actual question about Google's motivations here, but I do think Street View is valuable, and what's genuinely valuable for users, eventually leads to money for the provider. However, I am genuinely curious why you had to qualify your very reasonable question with a "I am not trolling or flaming". I have noticed many other commenters do this recently, and don't understand the need for qualifying yourself if you have a genuine question. Btw, I am not trolling or... ;)
- bgraves 15y ago
  Yes, I agree that it's valuable and will eventually lead to revenue. Perhaps the "mystery" stops right there. Sometimes it can be difficult to clearly communicate in short forum-style posts. I don't always qualify my posts, but in this case, I didn't want HN readers to think my posts boiled down to ripping on this Google Street View announcement. I should let my posts speak for themselves and work on being more concise. ;) I feel like there's been an increase in this type of behavior since points were removed from individual posts.
qq66 15y ago
If you think about all the hype around "local," Street View is a massive and near-impossible to duplicate asset in that battle. With some good image recognition of signs, people, etc. Google could map out specific business locations, exact address locations, which combined with real-time location information from mobile Maps users can make Google Maps basically undefeatable (and it has a solid business model). Google can afford to play the "long game."
veyron 15y ago
The attack plan is simple: if you build it, they will come. Let's say I wanted to build a local business service. I could do all of the searching myself, or I could pay some money to google to leverage their platform. There is instant recognition of the google service, and it helps those startups decouple the difficulties of information acquisition from the business model. In general, google, facebook, apple all do the same thing: maintain a platform upon which others build stuff.
bnr 15y ago
They are using the imagery in the Navigation for Google Maps.
yellowbkpk 15y ago
This is all an (informed) guess, but here's how I imagine it happened: 2005-ish MapQuest, Google Maps, etc. were all using Navteq and TeleAtlas as their data providers. Google was probably paying millions of dollars per year for licensing Navteq and TeleAtlas' entire data sets. They were probably dumping hundreds of expensive engineer-hours into merging these datasets, applying updates every quarter, dealing with customer feedback, etc. In 2006 or so they probably did some napkin-math and saw that a) owning their own data would let them do whatever the heck they wanted with their maps (I bet Navteq wanted much more money for the ability to sell ads on top of their data) and b) over time, it would be cheaper to spend a few million shipping cars and paying drivers to collect their own data than handle the increasingly-unreliable commercial data vendors (remember that at the time the commercial vendors didn't have any competition and so weren't doing much more than driving new roads every few months). Also, for the most part geo-data is a one-time cost. The majority of the world's road network stays the same and further updates can be applied using customer feedback (MapMaker) or aerial imagery. Oh, they also had this handset project coming out called "Android" that needed access to a non-GPS method of determining location, so they strapped some wifi cards onto the cars. I don't think there's any question that the millions of dollars they spent to collect and index the physical data of the world was worth it. It improved every single one of their core products: Maps, Earth, Ads, Local, Places, etc. all sprouted from this data that they collected. Also, the huge leap they took is slowly being replicated by the commercial vendors (Navteq started driving their version of StreetView a few months after Google announced their first city).

by bgraves 15y ago

tsycho 15y ago

I don't have an answer to your actual question about Google's motivations here, but I do think Street View is valuable, and what's genuinely valuable for users, eventually leads to money for the provider. However, I am genuinely curious why you had to qualify your very reasonable question with a "I am not trolling or flaming". I have noticed many other commenters do this recently, and don't understand the need for qualifying yourself if you have a genuine question. Btw, I am not trolling or... ;)

bgraves 15y ago
Yes, I agree that it's valuable and will eventually lead to revenue. Perhaps the "mystery" stops right there. Sometimes it can be difficult to clearly communicate in short forum-style posts. I don't always qualify my posts, but in this case, I didn't want HN readers to think my posts boiled down to ripping on this Google Street View announcement. I should let my posts speak for themselves and work on being more concise. ;) I feel like there's been an increase in this type of behavior since points were removed from individual posts.

qq66 15y ago

If you think about all the hype around "local," Street View is a massive and near-impossible to duplicate asset in that battle. With some good image recognition of signs, people, etc. Google could map out specific business locations, exact address locations, which combined with real-time location information from mobile Maps users can make Google Maps basically undefeatable (and it has a solid business model). Google can afford to play the "long game."

veyron 15y ago

The attack plan is simple: if you build it, they will come. Let's say I wanted to build a local business service. I could do all of the searching myself, or I could pay some money to google to leverage their platform. There is instant recognition of the google service, and it helps those startups decouple the difficulties of information acquisition from the business model. In general, google, facebook, apple all do the same thing: maintain a platform upon which others build stuff.

bnr 15y ago

They are using the imagery in the Navigation for Google Maps.

yellowbkpk 15y ago

This is all an (informed) guess, but here's how I imagine it happened: 2005-ish MapQuest, Google Maps, etc. were all using Navteq and TeleAtlas as their data providers. Google was probably paying millions of dollars per year for licensing Navteq and TeleAtlas' entire data sets. They were probably dumping hundreds of expensive engineer-hours into merging these datasets, applying updates every quarter, dealing with customer feedback, etc. In 2006 or so they probably did some napkin-math and saw that a) owning their own data would let them do whatever the heck they wanted with their maps (I bet Navteq wanted much more money for the ability to sell ads on top of their data) and b) over time, it would be cheaper to spend a few million shipping cars and paying drivers to collect their own data than handle the increasingly-unreliable commercial data vendors (remember that at the time the commercial vendors didn't have any competition and so weren't doing much more than driving new roads every few months). Also, for the most part geo-data is a one-time cost. The majority of the world's road network stays the same and further updates can be applied using customer feedback (MapMaker) or aerial imagery. Oh, they also had this handset project coming out called "Android" that needed access to a non-GPS method of determining location, so they strapped some wifi cards onto the cars. I don't think there's any question that the millions of dollars they spent to collect and index the physical data of the world was worth it. It improved every single one of their core products: Maps, Earth, Ads, Local, Places, etc. all sprouted from this data that they collected. Also, the huge leap they took is slowly being replicated by the commercial vendors (Navteq started driving their version of StreetView a few months after Google announced their first city).