Google Earth Users Talk, Google Listens
One of the things I like best about the Google team developing Google Earth and Maps, is that they really listen to their users. Over the past few months, Google has been making many changes to their imagery processing for Google Earth. The goals seem to be to make imagery more consistent in appearance, improve coloration so the view of the globe looks less "mottled" (with strips of different photos), and to improve the interface between the 3D ocean bathymetry and the coastlines. According to GEB readers, and yours truly, some of the changes haven't been for the best.
For example, when GE 5 first came out, the interface between the coastlines and the new bathymetry actually covered over data for some islands and parts of coastlines. Google recognized the problems, but it took quite some before the changes were fixed. Several months. Then in June, Google introduced new coloration for the US. GEB was pretty vocal about complaining on this one - and a month later Google fixed it for some areas (but, not all). Unfortunately, they also added a new "coastline cutting" algorithm to cut the shape of the aerial imagery to the shape of the coastline. Many GE users complained about this one. Although it does look "cleaner" when viewing from higher altitudes, the change resulted in a loss of valuable data of offshore imagery (showing ships at sea, air traffic, anchorages, and more). Some of us told Google they should at a minimum not introduce the coastline cutting to the "Historical Imagery" archives. Again, Google has been listening: the recent imagery update removed the coastline cutting from most of the historical imagery!
The processes Google uses for making changes to the imagery, processing them for the servers, verifying the quality, and then delivering them to their live servers has taken at least 60 days normally. However, there are signs Google is improving the update speed.
Last week, an imagery update was pushed out (and found by GEB readers). Several places were found to have sub-standard imagery - clouds in the satellite photos, and dark and poor contrasted images. Now, only a few days later, several people have reported some of those images have been fixed. That's a much faster turn around!
On behalf of GEB readers, and other GE users, I would like to thank Google for listening. And, hopefully with their improved processes, we won't have to wait so long for future changes to materialize.
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