Google Wants To Map More of the World's Roads With Expansion of 'Road Mapper' Volunteer Community (techcrunch.com) 27
Google announced today that it is opening access to more contributors to participate in Road Mapper, a tool where you can add missing roads to Google Maps in areas of the world that need it most. TechCrunch reports: Road Mapper is an invite-only platform where people participate in challenges, drawing roads located in areas with a large population, yet have a significant amount of road network missing from Google Maps. Users draw road geometry using satellite images. The drawings then go through a review process and, if accepted, will be live on Google Maps in a few days. Those interested in joining Road Mapper can fill out Google's online form. Plus, top contributors that have mapped the most roads can now refer up to five contributors via the Road Mapper Referral form. Google's blog post notes that its contributors have mapped more than 1.5 million kilometers of roads, enabling more than 200 million people to navigate with Google Maps. That's pretty impressive considering Road Mapper only launched two years ago.
Yeah I'll volunteer (Score:3, Informative)
Sign me up: I'll add garbage information and pollute yours maps all day long just for fun.
Cheapskates...
Yay, giving free labor to a billion dollar company (Score:5, Insightful)
Now is your opportunity to provide free labor to a billion dollar company, aren't you happy?
Re: Yay, giving free labor to a billion dollar com (Score:2)
Hahah, good point
Gone are the Billion dollar company days
https://businessplus.ie/busine... [businessplus.ie]
I thought Google was already doing this? (Score:2)
Since Google owns Waze, it has had the feature for years, if you drive a new road it will map it but there's also this [waze.com] for mapping a road manually too.
Re: I thought Google was already doing this? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Waze and Google Maps don't share as much data as you might think.
Yes, they do.
I'm a senior "rank 5" editor on Waze, an active Local Guide on gmaps, and I was very active in Google's map maker before they shut it down. I've also met a lot of the higher ups at Waze, several of the top engineers for Geo/Google Maps, and been privy to quite a bit of knowledge about their internal workings that I have to keep confidential. But trust me that there's a lot of data shared back and forth between the two services, including place searches (did you know that when you do a search i
Re: I thought Google was already doing this? (Score:2)
submit to open street map (Score:5, Interesting)
use OSMand and contribute soemthing to the world rather than google https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OsmAnd#To_record_and_submit_GPX_tracks
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/ [f-droid.org]
F-Droid Free
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand [google.com]
Google Play
https://itunes.apple.com/app/id934850257 [apple.com]
iTunes App Store
Re: (Score:2)
Does OSM have accurate maps of the entire planet or do they bow down to governments in places like China that ban accurate maps?
Re:submit to open street map (Score:5, Interesting)
That's an interesting question. I didn't know, so I searched for "accuracy of open street map in china". According to this Reddit thread [reddit.com] OSM has accurate maps of China. They have no presence there, and it's illegal for anyone in China to use it or contribute to it. So they don't need to care about following Chinese laws. Also see Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for more information about it.
Re: (Score:3)
That's an interesting question. I didn't know, so I searched for "accuracy of open street map in china". According to this Reddit thread [reddit.com] OSM has accurate maps of China. They have no presence there, and it's illegal for anyone in China to use it or contribute to it. So they don't need to care about following Chinese laws. Also see Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for more information about it.
They're accurate to us, from outside of China. But the Chinese government requires that mapping services use a custom "map projection" that deliberately skews maps by up to several hundred meters, using some sort of encrypted calculation that is deliberately not documented and hard to work with. But yes, people have been able to reverse engineer it to create maps of China. That's why when you browse most maps of the country that show a street overly on top of satellite imagery, the two layers will be misali
Gonna pass (Score:2)
Why would anyone want to help a billion dollar company make more money for free? I used to contribute to google maps and business reviews, they offered me a 3 dollar discount if I signed up for a new youtube music account. I was already subscribing to youtube music so I got nothing instead...
Re: (Score:2)
This is why I have never been an Amazon Kindle owner. I have always bought books from Barnes & Nobel, which allow DRM free books to be sold on their devices.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe not sold, but kindle does allow you to load drm free books on it now.
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This is why I have never been an Amazon Kindle owner. I have always bought books from Barnes & Nobel, which allow DRM free books to be sold on their devices.
Yup. My B&N Library is backed up on three PCs at home, so even if they disappear it from the online repository, I've still got access.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess if you think about it that way. However, the same argument could be made for companies like X, Meta, Bytedance and a hundred others that don't produce any content themselves but reap all the benefits of a huge volunteer workforce that generates it for them.
Some of the same incentives apply to creating maps for Google....
Re: (Score:2)
Why would anyone want to help a billion dollar company make more money for free?
While this may seem like a valid question to us plebes down here in the gutter, the billion dollar companies have spent generations being told how vital they are to the economy, to the government, to the people, to the state of the world, that the board members, the C-suites, the decision makers, they all truly believe they are important. And us peasants should be pleased to be asked to contribute to their corporate coffers because LOOK AT ALL THE GOOD THEY DO!
Try not to scrape your forehead on the floor as
Anecdote (Score:2)
The road we live on, in a small village, has existed for around 10 years. It is clearly visible on satellite pics, but oddly absent from Google Maps.
This obviously causes problems with deliveries and first-time visitors. Google offers a way to suggest map corrections, and I submitted our road a couple of years ago. Nothing.
OSM is correct and up to date, and was already when we moved here. Sadly, OSM navigation is weird and unreliable, so I can't really recommend it...
Re: (Score:2)
Ponzi scheme much? (Score:2)
Others have said it but: So you decide to work for free for one of the richest companies in the world, to improve their product. Your reward? You get to invite other people to work for free too.
Think I'll pass.
Re: Ponzi scheme much? (Score:1)
I mean pyramid scheme of course.
volunteer? (Score:1)
Pay up, bitches.
Hey Google: fuck you, pay me (Score:1)
Alphabet is worth $1.7 trillion dollars. $1,700,000,000,000. And they want volunteer labor? I hope this fails and backfires dramatically.