6 Comments

Google accused of airbrushing / prettifying New Orleans

April 3, 2007 by in Stupid with 6 Comments

new-orleans.jpg

Google is receiving a little criticism due to the fact that Google Maps is now showing older satellite images of the New Orleans area before hurricae Katrina. You can view the re-updated view of New Orleans which is quite different from the view depicted back in 2005.

Almost two years after tearing through Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, killing in excess of 1,800 people and leaving a damage bill of approximately $80 billion USD in its wake, the after effects of fearsome Hurricane Katrina are still being felt. And this week, those effects have even extended to Google.

More specifically, Web search engine giant Google Inc. has recently been criticised for replacing New Orleans’ storm-damaged satellite imagery through its popular online maps feature with older views captured prior to the devastating impact of Katrina in August of 2005.

A related article run by the Associated Press at the tail end of last week outlined the geographic changes implemented to the popular map engine. This then subsequently led to a U.S. House Subcommittee pointing accusatory fingers at Google with regard to “airbrushing history” for the sake of relaying a conveniently untouched depiction of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

What are your thoughts concerning Google’s decision to change the satellite view of New Orleans using older pre-Katrina images?


  • Alex

    The images for Google Maps are a dataset somewhere in the terabytes in terms of size. There is NO WAY they handle these by hand. So I really doubt there was a conscious decision by anyone human at Google to swap out recent images for older images. Since it wasn’t a human doing it, my guess is they got hold of some images that were in some way (in terms of resolution would be my guess.), and the computar swapped in the older, but higher res. photos. No doubt they’ll get some more up to date as-good-or-better photos soon.

    But there’s really no way this was a “decision” made by Google, so much as a programmatic choice regarding image quality made by the code that runs Google Maps.

  • http://www.paulstimesink.com Paul Westbrook

    I don’t believe that Google was intending to “airbrush history”. I think that they were attempting to upgrade to higher resolution photos, but the only ones that they had were from before Katrina.

    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/about-new-orleans-imagery-in-google.html

    According to that post, they have expedited publishing more recent versions.

  • Jed

    I don’t see what the big deal is.

  • Chris

    Nice to see a House Subcommittee is involved. :rolleyes: How could you possibly think this is intentional on Google’s part? Google has nothing to gain. If anything, I’d think the government might be the ones wanting to swap in a nicer picture, but I’ll stick with the Pre-Katrina was higher-res theory because it actually makes sense.

  • chad

    @House Subcommittee

    yo…. it’s just a fucking website … you schmucks probably all use askjeeves anyway.

  • Matt K.

    Okay, photos older than 2005? Jeez, I was looking at where my house location is, and I see the red truck we haven’t had for 7 years. So, from my point of view, its ridiculous that they’re criticizing a photo for being older than 2 years old. They aren’t going to go and take new pictures just for the heck of it, they’re probably just going to use what they’ve got, and those photos may have been up way before hurricane damage.

    Besides, they can only get new photos if the sky is nice and clear, which can be a hassle for some areas.

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