(Credit:
Paul Ford)
The release of Google Earth 5 has further whetted the Googlebot's voracious appetite for new data.
Specifically, Google wants more views of the planet for the new historical imagery feature in Google Earth 5, which lets people see earlier views of a particular area, not just the present. The company established an Imagery Partner Program through which organizations can supply their data.
Don't expect to be paid for helping Google out, though. "We are happy to add your map content to Google's services at no cost to you, but we generally do not pay for content," the company said on its image partnership frequently-asked-questions page.
In fairness, Google offers some situations where sharing the data would be in the interest of a municipality, for example, that wants to be on the map but is tired of waiting for GeoEye-1's satellite camera to whiz overhead. There probably also are organizations with public-domain imagery that would like to see it made broadly accessible but that aren't trying to build some business out of it.
Plus, Google has a point that processing lots of geographic data is laborious. Who wants to orthorectify and georeference a bunch of data sets? Quoting some of Google's reasons for why people might want to share:
• Make a positive impact on your community and the world
• Simplify navigation and geographic analysis
• Raise awareness of land use and environmental issues
• Facilitate emergency management• Boost tourism and foster economic development
• Enable visitors and tourism agencies to plan and present travel itineraries
• Support business site location planning
Google showed off new ocean views at its Google Earth 5.0 launch event.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Google announced the new partnership program on its Lat Long blog Thursday.
Mapping is getting more important in the digital world as new possibilities open up for navigation and finding nearby friends. Google has aggressively pursued this area with online maps and satellite views, and the company has begun testing advertisements in Google Maps and Google Earth.
Yahoo doesn't share quite the degree of obsession as Google, but it's working hard on geography too. On Wednesday, Yahoo announced that it has 100 million geotagged photos on Flickr, its image-sharing site. Geotagged photos have map coordinates built in, letting people find photos of a particular region or explore their own archive geographically.
Accepting others' data could help Google accelerate its geographic agenda, though. And who knows, maybe they can get somebody in Clarkesville, Md., to help fix weird purple arcs that show up in Street View.
These weird purple arcs appear on when checking out Clarkesville, Maryland using Google Maps Street View.
(Credit: Google)Google has added a new level of detail to the tools advertisers can use to track the performance of their search-ad campaigns, showing them the geographic region of the users who clicked on the ads.
Advertisers pay Google for ads next to search results when users click on them, so obviously advertisements have an interest in knowing details about where those users are located. "By specifically targeting those locations where your ads perform best you can maximize your campaign's performance," Google's Trevor Claiborne said on the Inside AdWords blog Thursday.
The move illustrates one of the aspects of online advertising: detailed analytics let advertisers much more precisely determine the success or failure of advertising as measured by clicks on ads, views to Web sites, and conversions of advertisements into actions such as registering for a site or buying a product.
Separately, Google also said in a separate AdWords post on Thursday that it's adjusted performance-monitoring tools so advertisers can distinguish ads viewed through search results and through browsing content.
"Because search and content network statistics can differ greatly, viewing aggregate statistics for a campaign running on both networks may not give you granular insight into your performance," Google's Christian Yee said on the blog. "For example, a high number of impressions and a low click-through rate on the search network may be signals that you should optimize, but similar statistics on the content network are unlikely to indicate poor performance."
Update 10:12 a.m. PDT: I changed the headline; Thierry was a long-time, senior programmer but said he wasn't high-ranking.
The programmer who for years helped develop the Google Earth software package has left the search and advertising company.
"I've cut the Google ship loose. Yesterday was my last day at Google," said Wes Thierry on his blog on Thursday. Thierry was a senior engineer for the client software portion of Google Earth, which also taps into data stored on Google servers.
Thierry worked on the project for six years, first at Keyhole then at Google after it acquired the satellite mapping firm in 2004, and he said by e-mail that he's looking for something new.
"I have been working on the same product for quite a while now. I liked working for a smaller company in the early days, and even at Google in the Early days. The team has become very large, and I left because I just need a change. I will always have fond memories of Google, but it just isn't the same company it was a few years ago," he said. Up next: some vacation in Europe then work for a virtual reality company.
In his blog post, Thierry said there were rough times just before he joined Keyhole, with employees not getting paid. But the Iraq war gave the company some attention through CNN's use of Keyhole products. But the CIA was the real financial lifeline in the early days, he said, though only referring to the Central Intelligence Agency by its nickname.
"Keyhole was always scrambling to please our biggest customer, the Agency, which used our cool interface to view their own top-secret data," he said. "Even today, the Agency is a large customer of Google's, but their importance and influence on day-to-day development has waned since their money is no longer a significant part of Google's income."
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