Mountain View, California — Found an error with the placement of your favorite pizza place on Google Maps? Well, now you can fix it yourself, as the search engine giant Google on Tuesday, invited armature cartographers to refine the U.S. map for Google Maps and Google Earth, with its online Google Map Maker, hoping that interested individuals will take the time and effort to correct errors and omissions, and to add details.
Google is pretty smart in giving and taking, especially something that is freely done. Having used free labor for its PageRank algorithm and more recently for allowing users in 183 countries and regions to modify the online maps, now the map of the United States is also open for anyone to embellish.
Google Map Maker was unveiled almost three years ago, and now Google plans to extended the reach of its Map Maker once again to the clicks of the crowd to improve its services in the United States and added new capabilities such as street-level perspective on places with Street View imagery, editable points of interest, and powerful search options that can see small details like railroad tracks.
“Today we are opening the map of the United States in Google Map Maker for you to add your expert local knowledge directly. You know your neighborhood or hometown best, and with Google Map Maker you can ensure the places you care about are richly represented on the map. For example, you can fix the name of your local pizza parlor, or add a description of your favorite book store,” Google wrote in a blog post.
Google Map Maker provides a way for users to annotate and alter Google Maps. The search engine giant is presenting this as a way to add local landmarks and businesses, map college campuses and mark bike lanes, but you can also add new roads and adjust attributes, such as speed limit and road conditions, for existing routes.
Google has also embedded street-level images from Street View directly into Map Maker for easier navigation. The service banks on signed-in users to approve alterations proposed by other users. When users have proposed a significant number of edits that get approved, they earn Google’s trust and can post without moderation in most cases.
{japopup type=”iframe” content=”images/stories/demo/2011/april/google invites amateur cartographers_1_big.png” width=”1024″ height=”600″}
{/japopup}
Click to enlarge…
To commence your adventure as an amateur cartographer, head over to the Google Map Maker site and either add pinpoints that were not there before or adjust incorrect information, like the wrong placement for that pizza store where everybody reckons your name.
Lalitesh Katragadda, technical lead for Google Map Maker, says that Google’s map making project began with the insight that most of the world does not have access to high-quality maps and that even where such maps are available, important details are often missing.
Only 15% of people in the world had access to high-quality maps when Google Map Maker was launched, said Katragadda. Today, that percentage has doubled, he insisted.
“The world is a living, breathing entity,” said Katragadda. “We want that to be reflected in a living, breathing map.”
In March, Google blogged about how 60 women in Nairobi, Kenya got together to map their city online with Google Map Maker. Google also pointed to a map of IIT Bombay as another Map Maker-refined map.
Google Map Maker requires Internet Explorer 7.0 and later, Firefox 3.6 and later (for Windows, Mac, and Linux), Safari 3.1 and later (for Mac and Windows), or Google Chrome (for Windows and Mac).
Watch a video of how Google Map Maker works:
{iframe width=”620″ height=”390″ align=”top”}http://www.youtube.com/embed/znCPgldRWTc{/iframe}