The story of Google Earth Yahoo Maps
If we look back to the 16th or 17th century when one part of the world was unfamiliar to the habitats of the other, we find thrilling stories of many dauntless explorers and sailors. James Rennell was one of those campaigners who came from Great Britain to map Indian subcontinent at the age of mere 22. In his quest he set out with all the latest technologies of those days that included a compass and a perambulator for measuring distance. He was accompanied by a band of soldiers. The map he drew was the core of British understanding of India for years and was published in 1780. However, it took a long 6 years to complete the graph at the cost of one of his campaigners life who was killed by a tiger. Rennell himself and 5 others were injured by leopards. According to Rennell, “blanks on the map of the world were eyesores”. Days are gone by. John Hanke- the director of Google Maps and Google Earth says “Bangalore wasn’t mapped on Google’s products” while standing in the safe and sound Google’s Mountain View campus in California. He had the detailed map hanging from the wall showing even the tiny cottages around the city of Bangalore. John Hankes continues, “as you can see, it’s very well mapped now” bringing out the satellite imagery and added information about a Hindu temple on the map. Numerous tags, place marks and bubble texts pop up while exploring places like Bangalore. Information about streets and lanes, about small playgrounds or even a hundred years old banyan tree can be found, let alone prominent places like Chinnaswamy Stadium or Karnataka High Court which even have got links to Wikipedia offering history and other information including photographs showing interior and exterior.
Google didn’t have to do it all by themselves, rather they started the revolution and the users completed it. Google initiated by using the satellite images of the world, according to Hankes which was nothing but a substrate. Then Google offered easy access and ability to edit information by anyone from anywhere of the world. And this gigantic database of information was created. It wouldn’t have been possible for any human mapping agency or workforce otherwise.
Mapmaking was never so easy before. At a time, when explorers like Rennel or Lewis and Clark used to walk the lands in person to collect information it would take too much of endeavor as well as huge funding and government back up. Even after the invention of aerial photography system and satellite imagery facilities mapping was left for the professionals.
It’s only in these days serious mapmaking is possible by amateur photographers, passersby or school boys using a pc and internet connection. Thanks to Google, Yahoo and MSN for developing so many utilities for the mass people enabling them to edit or insert information, images, links, data or even sounds in the digital map of the earth. And the trend is rolling on forming an ever enriching atlas, the “geoweb”- a giant, that is unlikely to be pinned down.
The geoweb has almost everything included within, ranging from narrowly focused clefts, hidden biking trails on mountains or local favorite coffee shops, guides for travelers to more explained locations giving people the ultimate control to “create their own ground truth”- as Mike Liebhold a senior researcher from Silicon valley’s Institute for the future describes.
Just to give an idea about the expansion of geowebs utility it can be mentioned that, a well illustrated layer in Google earth was exposed by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum about the inhumane genocide in Darfur. They revealed those black burned villages and also provided useful links to more information in audio and video formats.
The workforce behind these projects are massive “6billion pairs of eyes” describes Michael Goodchild, professor of geography from UC Santa Barbara. He believes it to be endeavors by individuals who work as observers and create their own map data. Rightly so, this is how it was created. But now the use is not limited within casual browsers locating their own homes or basketball courts, the maps are being used for large scale operations like rescuing victims of Katarina by US air force or purposes like that.
The evolution of the concept behind digital maps:
Even though Google maps and Google Earth software have become the prominent name for digital mapping nowadays, the way was paved by Xerox Parc when it launched mapping application online even before Netscapes browser. On the other hand online driving directions have been in use for around 2 decades now. Then in January 2005, for the first time, Google launched the Google maps and later on Google Earth around the mid 2005. Google maps for mobile devices also aided users a lot by enabling them to find local businesses, shops, restaurants and so on.
At that time the flow of information was form the map maker to the viewer, but the idea was revolutionize when Paul Rademacher invented the concept of generating mesh up of maps. He experienced the needs in real life when he was driving across Bay area searching for a house for rent with list of craigslist ads and maps piled up on his lap. Introducing that map mesh up idea brought all those separate pieces of maps into one usable copy.
The story of Rademacher continues. It was 8 weeks later when he launched a demo to link craigslist housing locations with Google Maps. Then happened the unthinkable. He posted the link to his demo on Craigslist and discovered thousands of people started sharing it overnight. He himself never estimated how big it was going to be, “I just wanted to write something useful” as he mentioned.
Rademacher was hired by Google later on as his invention added huge value to Google. Following that Google made the code open so that public can add or edit their own maps, mark spots or include information for others to share. So did Yahoo and Microsoft. Within months the atlas started getting filled with map mash ups.
At present there are no less than 55,000 mashed up Google maps available which makes Google the second busiest map making site in the world. Thanks to Paul Rademacher. Someday, there will be a Paul rademacher statue in front of the Googleplex” rightly said by Greg Sterling. Being influenced by the technology thousands of software and website developers started introducing tools and utilities to create personal mash up maps of favorite places using Google Maps. To mention a few, Panaramio and Platial are one of the most popular utilities and no wonder Panaramio already logged over million pictures snapped by individuals.
The next big story is that, Google launches its own map mash up software this April that allowed people to create and share their own mash ups using Googles own utility. However the concept wasn’t totally new as Microsoft already added this feature in their live search maps and Yahoo allowed people to tag geographical information with their photos using Flickr. But still Google added some values to it by planning to make the entire geoweb searchable. It won’t be limited to Google Maps only. With increasing popularity there comes additional works to sort out the really useful information from all data submitted by curious users. And this is compared by Hanke as “we are approaching is as a problem that’s not unlike page rank and the web.”
Google Earth and Google Maps are supported by terabytes of satellite imagery, data, aerial photography and road maps that Google buys from commercial providers at their companion offices in New York, Hyderabad, Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Sydney and Zurich. From just the outlook of the building 45, southeast of the company’s main building, it is not possible to guess about these huge venture going on inside.
Looking back to the past of Hanke, he grew up in town called Cross Plains in Texas, nearly 120 miles away from Fort Worth. It has merely 1000 habitats that day. But now Google Earths Mountain View campus is a grand structure with compact grid of 24 streets and vast farmlands surrounding them. When Hanke recalls the past, he can only see a blinking red light and a Dairy Queen with only a few downtown stores. Just like other curious boys Hanke also had the urge to see what’s beyond, the urge to see the unseen. He worked in Washington DC after his studies in College and then went to Burma on a task relating to foreign policy before finally getting involved in a video game startup.
Hanke was inspired by the novel -Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson where the Central Intelligence Corporation designed a detail map of the planet earth and protagonists used it there. In 2001 Hanke formed his own company and named it Keyhole. He and the fellow engineers used all their experiences from game designing to engineer their new software the 3d “Earth Viewer” that would use imagery stored in Keyholes servers.
The journey continues as in 2003 Hanke owned Keyhole signed a contact with In-Q-Tel, which was a government lead entity funded partially by the CIA. Thus the software gained popularity among US military and intelligence sectors. Since then until today they remain one of the biggest customers of Google earth. Talking about that developing software Gregg Black, director of the eGeoint Management branch of the agency says, “… Immediately we said, this is going to be powerful.” Actually it was by means of that emerging software making mash ups became possible in hours, instead of years. Although at that time the data consisted only of a few low resolution satellite images and other commercially available maps, it impressed them a lot.
The success didn’t stop there but it became a bigger hit among the mass people as they would like to zoom in and out to see corners of the world, rotate and revolve the globe to see their homes from all aspects and what not. The most appreciated feature of all was definitely the opportunity to tag their favorite places. It became so popular among civilians that soon the over enthusiasts started marking oddities like “where I met her for the first time”, “my favorite bench in the park” or even on the blurred military installation. The company dealt with these issues by introducing a system called layers where users can save and edit their favorite places in a file format called KLM for future references, sharing or publishing. By marking or unmarking these layers users can toggle views showing borders, streets, 3d buildings, place marks as so on.
In 2004, the future of The Earth Viewer, the then version of Google Earth took a major turn. For the first time when Sergey Brin downloaded a copy of Earth Viewer he was so impressed by the product and its potential, he interrupted a meeting to “fly” to the houses of the attending executives using the software. After that it didn’t take long before Google bought the company Keyhole, shifted Hanke and his company to Building 45 and rebranded the software as Google Earth. It’s not publicly known what was the big amount Google paid for this giant venture.
It was mid 2005 when Google earth was first launched. Since then it kept the spot of one of the most downloaded software throughout the world, with number of total downloads nearing 300 million times till today. Not only it is popular among students, researchers, teachers, service holders or government intelligence but the seamless zoom in and out function made it a must for shows like weather broadcasts, reports and news on the television. What is more, nowadays there are dedicated sited like Nasa’s World Wind and Microsoft’s Live Maps along with Google’s Siteseeing to bookmark odd and rare finds. Nothing is excluded from the list. Not even the latest earthquake activities in Hayward or the movements of a tagged whale shark in the blues- everything can be shared. More and more values are being added to Google Earth as Yelp offered layers to show nearby restaurants and hotels, National Geographic offers layers for photographs and counting on. The author of “Everything is miscellaneous”, David Weinberger commented “It’s always been the case that maps have value because they show one subject and hide the rest.”
To provide user with the most valuable data in the most convenient way, Google is finding it extremely important to enable searching using keywords. To provide with these information Google depends on their online data store house, web directories or listings bought from yellow pages. However, searching with keyword like “cape town coffee shop” won’t always bring enough information to satisfy users. Simply because it’s not possible for Google to know the location of every business all by themselves, until and unless people who know the information share with them.
To store more information about places and surrounding businesses Google today is striving to make the KLM format the standard and they are indexing all the KLM files available. The good news is that, so far they have managed to pile up a few millions. One of the Google product managers, Jessica Lee says, “...what we don't have is the sort of niche, long-tail content. We don't know where all the endangered species or the pandas in China live, or where the best places to go bird-watching are. By providing the tools, we can let other people create it."
Now what about the next big leap? Microsoft already had an option to view street level photographs although in a limited extent. Now Google launches its next massive expenditure in the form of the street view project.
What if you could walk along an unknown lane and click the buildings around you to get information about the structures and the map of the locale? It would be like living in the world wide web in real time. It’s not a dream anymore. With the amazing concept in mind Google launches their journey to store the images of streets and highways, lanes and squares. Primarily they targeted San Francisco Bay area, New York, Las Vegas and after successfully completing the phase they are expanding the project to other cities.
It will literally be possible for pedestrian to click on real world to know all this information with the help of a camera phone, internet connection and the software itself.
Online maps have become part and parcel of people’s lives now days. Kids may play with Google earth to find out their grandmas place, at the same time intensive rescue operations like saving lives of the victims of Katarina proceed with the aid of Google Maps, as Us Air Force used Google Earth to rescue hundreds of people taking shelter on roof tops. After a few days, when a civilian reported that Google Earth replaced the images of the city before the hurricane with the images of the devastated city it made the congressman Brad Miller to write to the CEO of the company saying about it- “appears to be doing the victims of Hurricane Katrina a great injustice by airbrushing history."
Thanks to the backup images in their server. Google quickly replaces the images and responded that the update was automated. But at the same time it reveals the fact that, “the database has become so much a part of people's lives", says Chikai Ohazama, One of the founders of Keyhole.
Nevertheless Google Earth becomes the hot topic of politics in some places as well. The well known issues are there as Bahrain and Morocco tried to block this software for some security reasons as they claimed but only managed to make their residents smuggle the data as PDF formats. A report by BBC also says Iraqis used this software to find weak points on the border to escape from the country. The story goes on and on.
"Mapping has always been a tool of dominance," according to Michael Goodchild, geographer from Santa Barbara. Cartography has always been regarded a prime concern of the rulers of colonial age and they used to send map makers like Rennel and others to keep themselves one step ahead of other powers. There is no doubt that issues like countries security and secrecy will remain. So the question raises who is there to censor the data and how much we are going to trust them with it.
"Once you express location in human terms, you get multiple places with the same name, or political issues over where boundaries are, or local differences," says David Weinberger. "As soon as you leave the latitude/ longitude substrate, you get lost in the ambiguous jumble of meaning. It's as close to Babel as we get." Still today nobody can deny the fact that cartography unleashes great power for human beings. The only big difference is that today we all are cartographers. Everybody has his own map, no matter how small it is. When individuals share those little maps of their locales and when the minute data submitted by those 6 billion pairs of eyes unite together it forms a huge storehouse of information. Together with technologies like satellite and aerial photography, geography has stepped in the free for all era of information technology.
Google Earth
Google earth is a revolutionary software which uses satellite imagery and an array of other information to provide geographical data including maps, distances, levels, terrains and much more to the end users. With the click of a mouse it makes possible travelling from the outer space to the deep of Grand Canyon, from inside of the great Amazon to the pyramids of Egypt.
Google Earth Extreme
Like everything else on the earth, Google Earth also claims the amount of resources from any PC that matches its class. Google earth doesn’t work like high definition PC games or heavy 3d modeling software but still it takes great deal of tweaking and tuning of the PC as well as internet connection for pleasant experience. No doubt, if you want minute details of the terrains from entire galaxy, jump between 3 dimensional views of places you need something special.
This is why we are here to make your experience with Google Earth a delightful one.
If you have a look at the huge gap between minimum and recommended system requirements for Google Earth its clearly visible that, even though one can run the software in almost any working PC, to enjoy a better performance, look and feel he will need much more. And much more.
Google Earth System requirements:
Minimum: · CPU: Pentium 3, 500Mhz |
Recommended: · CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz+ or AMD 2400xp+ |
Common Google Earth Performance:
Google earth performance issues are common for both beginner and advanced level users. Most of them can be solved using manual tweaks. However, average users who usually take these issues for granted almost never know what they are actually missing. They hardly discover the best of Google Earth. Most common problems that users encounter are-Program takes so long before loading.
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- Failure to connect with Google Earth’s Server (due to internet connection problems).
- Blank/ blurred screen or no image.
- Pc stops responding.
- More commonly, images clear up too slowly.