Comments on: Google accused of airbrushing / prettifying New Orleans

By: Matt K.

Matt K. — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:40:03 +0000

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.

By: chad

chad — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:05:09 +0000

@House Subcommittee

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

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:21:28 +0000

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.

By: Jed

Jed — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 18:32:27 +0000

I don’t see what the big deal is.

By: Paul Westbrook

Paul Westbrook — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 18:04:26 +0000

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.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:50:48 +0000

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.