London — In a novel twist to utilize indigenously produced information, Google has announced a major change to its mapping service in the UK, switching to home-produced maps data in the UK, Germany, Finland and Sweden.
In a surprising move to reduce expenditure and minimize its dependency on outside companies, Google this week abandoned their third-party map data provider in the UK, Germany, Finland and Sweden to a Google-produced platform. Its a major move for the company, which has previously used data from specialist mapping companies such as TeleAtlas.
“You may notice many improvements to Google Maps in these countries, such as improved water bodies and more comprehensive local park coverage. Many of these and other modifications are the result of us working directly with a variety of organizations, agencies and data providers,” explained Google’s Valient Gough of the changes.
“For example, Germany’s Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie) supplied us balanced data from surveying and mapping agencies of all 16 federal states (Länder). And in the case of Finland, we acquired water body data directly from the National Land Survey. We are thankful to these and other data providers for helping us ensure that our digital maps accurately reflect real life.”
In addition, to help resolve this inevitable kinks in the mapping data, Google is pushing its ‘Report a Problem’ tool for the aforementioned countries. This also means that when you see an issue in these countries where the maps are powered by Google, you should use the report a problem link at the bottom right. This will now appear in the lower-right corner of Google Maps, and allows users to report errors or omissions to the company for correction.
Here is a picture:
Image Courtesy: (SearchEngineLand.com)
A video detailing how to use the ‘Report a Problem’ tool is reproduced below, while the new maps are live on Google Maps now.
{iframe width=”620″ height=”390″ align=”top”}http://www.youtube.com/embed/JoyMEE-kIrg{/iframe}