Google Maps Is More Accurate Because They Say It Is

Google says its map is accurate because they made it:

The challenge of using multiple sources of information is conflation,” said Brian McClendon , the head of Google Earth and Maps. There is no way to mix the best of one company’s product with the best of another.” By owning all of the information, he says, Google can more readily check the quality of the information it’s getting, and subject it to Google-type computer analysis using things like computer vision, machine learning, or GPS data, as well as humans checking some data.

Bull shit. There is no difference between getting data from some hippie riding one of those Google bicycles and vetting it or getting data from TomTom and vetting it. If I worked for Google Maps I’d kill myself.

And he got a nice dig into OpenStreetMap as well.

Of course, the other companies might try to get their map information from the fast-growing opensource map project called OpenStreetView. Mr. McClendon said, however, that this was one case where many contributors did not necessarily produce better results, since they were working from different standards. Merging data from multiple sources of truth is hard,” he said, and mapping is the best example of that.”

Wow, my head hurts.


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Date
July 20, 2012