Spamming Google Maps

An anonymous reader writes "Google organized a flyover of Sydney, Australia last Friday for Australia Day. The images taken on the day will be posted to Google Maps in a few weeks. A number of dotcoms spent hours making huge signs that would be visible from the air. It will be interesting to see whether Google will repeat the event in other cities. If they do, get prepared early. What sign would you make?"

Re:None

[morgan_greywolf]

None, because it ruins the entire point of maps if you turn them into nothing but billboards.

Does it, though? I could see, for instance, fast food chains getting in on the action. Imagine, if you will, if all of the KFCs got together and on the roof of each of the KFC restauraunts is a huge image of Colonel Sanders at the time Google is doing the fly-by photos. You'd know right where get your Original Recipe(tm) Bucket of Chicken without even searching!

The best part.

[Eevee]

The signs were too small. All you'll see in the final resolution is a thin white line. You're talking about possibly four or five pixels wide.

Penis Spam on GoogleMaps

[blantonl]

There is even Penis Spam on google maps:

The Yarm School in the UK (Kids Drawing a Penis on the Roof)

http://googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=&c=&t=k&hl=en& ll=54.506361,-1.35223&z=19 [googlesightseeing.com]

.. and of course the classic Penis-on-the-frozen-lake:

http://googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=1211&c=&t=k&hl =en&ll=41.049308,-73.600947&z=18 [googlesightseeing.com]

Re:None

[Score Whore]

None, because it ruins the entire point of maps if you turn them into nothing but billboards.

Ummm. This is Google we're talking about. The guys who do everything they can to convince people to place ads on every page on the internet? (As an fyi, Google's ads frequently make up 20-30% of the data transfered when you load up a page with their ads.)

Have you ever put something like "Mt. Rainier" into Google maps? Does it seem fucking stupid that Mt. Rainier is not one of the returned results? Maybe Google has already "ruined the entire point of maps."

Already done?

[Bigbutt]

Don't know if it's on Google's maps, but GeoEye has done it already.

http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_5047747 [denverpost.com]

[John]

Re:None

[sethawoolley]

For places without street addresses, the geocoder can look up the information directly in the POI (point of interest) database and find coordinates for any feature the website is exposing. Google's map interface isn't the most well-written, even though the geocoder software they use/license (or used at one point) is perfectly capable of this.

For road routing of non-road-network points, they can either "snap to" the nearest road, or the POIs often have "entry links" where you're supposed to be routed to on the road network to get enter there (often more accurate than finding the nearest road).

Full disclosure: I work in the data department of a location-based services company that has a technology-providing business relationship with Google Maps, but I don't deal with Google directly and I'm not authorized to talk on behalf of my company to the public. If you want them to do better geocoding with better routing integration, send them a request, and they might be able to do it in short order. They should already be "capable" of it.

Re:None

[DjReagan]

Did they really fail? What was the point of the "experiment" that Google tried? What was the purpose behind them announcing the flyover in advance? Perhaps this is what Google wanted? Perhaps they wanted something else? What makes one action a success and another a failure?

Re:None

[Omestes]

Good point, but this isn't how things work anymore. For some reason companies have eschewed things such as the concept of brand loyalty, for the idea of shoving their image down your throat until you gag.

Go watch some sports, especially NASCAR, and notice that you've somehow been conned into watching a 2 hour commercial for Redbull, Oil, and Viagra, with the added joy of some commercials in between. All sports are like this now, I caught part of ESPN2's recap of the winter "X" Games, pardon, the JEEP winter "x" games, and found myself marveling at how EVERYONE had a commercial stuck on them, for things that they don't (probably) use, and that has nothing to do with snow boarding (Visa? Monster Energy Drink?). It all would be so much more convincing if these competitors advertised things that they used. Then your product would actually speak for itself.

Sorry for the rant, I'm getting rather feed up with the whole thing. I'm wondering how long it will be until all Americans are legally forced to tattoo some product to themselves in a visible area.

If KFC wants more business, then they should make better food, and change their original recipe back to the original recipe, the one that didn't make me camp in a bathroom for an hour after eating it. No amount of advertisement can ever match a quality product.