Really excited to see how this affects the Geoguessr[0] meta. This will be up there with Russia, Brazil, Turkey, USA, and Canada in that it can really make or break competitive games. Since the countries are so large and it can be difficult to tell which region you're in
If in urban areas, the presence of street signs in different languages will help in a multi-lingual country like India. The trees and terrain can also vary quite a bit, from arid to rain-forest.
A bunch of GeoGuessr streamers I watch can't tell the difference between Bangla and Sinhala/Tamil and basically do a 50-50 coin toss when it comes to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. I look forward to them being even more befuddled by all the Devanagari variants.
Bangla, Sinhala and Tamil have distinct scripts. Bangla script is similar to Devanagari script in the sense that you have the topline (overbar a.k.a. Shirorekha, literally headline). Sinhala does not have that.
Tamil is a completely distinct script.
Tamil is used in signs/boards in several southasian countries (Southern state of Tamilnadu and other southern states, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore). Particularly in Sri Lanka, due to its official language status, it is possible to to lead to ambiguity in GeoGuessr between India and Sri Lanka. Contextual clues can generally rule out Malaysia and Singapore. So, I can understand the ambiguity between Sri Lankan Tamil and Tamil used in India at script level, but Bangla and Tamil have such distinct scripts that there are simple heuristics you can use to disambiguate.
Really? I feel like these two in written form are pretty different, and I don't have any real knowledge of South Asian languages.
Personally I feel Thai and Lao are harder to tell apart (I've resorted to: Lao is more curvy, Thai uses more straight lines), and also how to tell apart Czech from Slovakian, or Danish from other Nordic languages. Of course there are other ways to tell where you are, and if you only rely on written language you will not become a great player.
I'd watch GeoRainbolt[1] and all the pros that play in his tournaments.
How did you end up telling apart Danish from “other Nordic languages”?
It’s quite trivial as a layman American who has lived in Scandinavia to tell Danish apart for Swedish (one immediate dead giveaway is usage of ø in Danish vs ö in Swedish). But apparently Danish and Norwegian in written form are almost indistinguishable, so reliance on cultural usage of words must be necessary
Norwegian has the diphthongs "ei" and "øy", while Danish has "ej" and "øj". Though I don't know whether you can rely on that when looking at proper names (surnames, place names).
Yes, it's funny. It ought to be trivial to differentiate between Bangla and Sinhala/Tamil because Bangla has the top horizontal line joining letters of a word whereas Sinhala/Tamil have the round jalebi-like letters. But somehow the streamers always forget about it.
(They're busy commentating, and they're not dedicated GeoGuessr streamers. It's understandable.)
But even if they could, it will still be harder when it comes time to differentiate between Hindi / Gujarati / Marathi / Bangla etc, which is why I'm looking forward to it.
Not really, I'm slightly above average but outclassed by many geoguessrs. And it is useless since I'll most likely never use this knowledge outside of geoguessr.
My point is that watching a geoguessr player who doesn't know how to interpret street signs is like watching a chess streamer who doesn't know about en passant. I guess if you're watching them for their humorous commentary or their cleavage, that's cool, but it hopefully is not because you think they're good players.
I could say the same about your first message in this conversation. You don't seem to be concerned with them viewing good players and seem more concerned about appearing better than.
My immediate thought as well. Please tell me they have region-based phone prefixes with an easy to learn arrangement. Brasil has this and it's very helpful. This will change the game for sure. No more "Obviously Bangladesh".
Yeah, this will be interesting. Since I don't really recognize different languages within India, it might take some time to learn them. Previously Bangladesh was really easy to distinguish from other Asian countries from their writing, but many Indian languages look very similar to me.
I find that an extremely inappropriate and insensitive sentiment.
India is a large, diverse, and inclusive country. As with any large countries there are bound to be pockets of poverty, sweeping statements like that helps no one other than propagating hateful sentiments.
I watch a lot of travel blogs. India trips all have one thing in common, long form >1 hour drive vlogs with nothing but garbage as far as the eye can see.
It's interesting to see how certain regulatory requirements of countries can disrupt the ubiquity of google maps. For the longest time South Korea looked completely different when you zoomed in on it in google maps. South Korea didn't want high-resolution map information to fall into the wrong hands, so they disallowed storing that kind of map data on foreign servers. I believe it was also hard/impossible to get driving directions [1].
Curiously, I just checked gmaps and it appears to look normal now. This must have happened in the past few months, not sure why I can't seem to find any info online.
I was somehow obsessed with this issue a few years ago for no good reason (I don't live in SK or have any tie to it), and wrote dozens of "feedbacks" to Google, despite knowing nothing would change. I guess I was just unreasonably irritated by this "imperfection".
I'm pretty sure the "fix" just involved them building a cloud center in the country and serving all the SK map data from there to get around the regulation. Unless something changed with the law itself that I'm unaware of.
> It's interesting to see how certain regulatory requirements of countries can disrupt the ubiquity of google maps.
It was done for the right reasons - security. You don't want foreign governments to have data on physical government assets, especially military and critical infrastructure. Moreover, the Google street view vans also collect other data (including scanning for WiFi networks and collecting associated metadata) - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285928324_The_Googl... ... I think it also collected atmospheric data (pollution levels etc).
Security was a blatant and transparent excuse for their protectionism. The same information has been and is available for practically anyone in the world, thanks to many different map service providers, satellite image providers, and even Korean map service companies making their service available outside Korea.
I should have specifically mentioned that I was talking about India - Street view was not allowed till now because the indian government wanted to study the matter more deeply before framing policies for it. To understand the hesitancy of the government, recall if you've come across any secure government facilities any where in the world. Most such infrastructure will have a common warning painted or posted publicly stating "Photography is prohibited / not allowed". Allowing the process of collecting street view data (i.e. taking photographs / videos of a locality) by foreign companies would make such warning redundant and a joke, even if they didn't use the data in their applications - they are not even supposed to have such data in the first place.
Here, I feel India has found a nice compromise - indian companies are allowed to get license to collect the street data, and others (including foreign companies like Google), can license it from them. This takes care of security concerns of the governments, creates more jobs, fosters a more competitive business environment (Google alone won't have the street data) and western investors can be relieved that the aim wasn't protectionism.
The security issues all would stem from the imagery simply being available to the public at all (and even then it's a stretch, most criminals/terrorists whatever will likely scout an area before doing anything anyway). I don't see how adding intermediaries adds the slightest bit of security at all. Could you expand on why you think it would?
As for Google collecting data itself, it's only collecting photographic imagery that anyone else can.
Google was funded by the CIA ( https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... ). It was part of the PRISM project where American Tech companies worked with US intelligence services to share data with them. India (or any country for that matter) would be fools to allow Google vans or any similar setup from a foreign company to allow them to scan an area (do electronic surveillance) and give them a blatant pass to photograph and spy on secure government facilities on behalf of US agencies. (US agencies that have worked to sabotage India's R&D in the past).
As I ELI5-ed in another comment:
To understand the hesitancy of the government, recall if you've come across any secure government facilities any where in the world - most such infrastructure will have a common warning painted or posted publicly stating "Photography is prohibited / not allowed". Allowing the process of collecting street view data (i.e. taking photographs / videos of a locality) by foreign companies would make such warning redundant and a joke, even if they didn't use the data in their applications - they are not even supposed to have such data in the first place.
Yes, terrorist and spies can certainly try to reconnaissance a secure facility themselves. But obviously the job will be harder to do undetected given the security guards and cameras. In fact, in the 26/11 terrorist attack on Mumbai, one of the terrorists caught mentioned that they had used Google Earth to familiarise themselves with the locality before they attacked - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks . Once that was revealed, there were immediately comments on how Google Satellite view is a threat to indian security. But the indian government didn't ban Google Maps satellite views because they understood this technology has become mainstream and they just reviewed their security policies and adapted it. With street views too, the government has finally come up with a decent policy - allow indian companies to collect and process the data, let the intelligence agencies review the data to remove sensitive information or even put in fake data to confuse anyone with nefarious intentions against India, and then allow anyone (including foreign companies) to license and use the data. That's a very decent compromise that Google should be happy with.
In 2010, it's expected that Android will take majority market share of smartphone. I think Google no longer needed to collect such data for wifi geolocation from vehicle .
Something I'm kinda interested in is how one might make a semi-complete, even locally, alternative to street view.
It seems like something that could potentially be made much cheaper with a collection of drones with 360 cameras. they could all be programmed to fill out areas relatively quickly I think. It might not be street height which would be a bit of a loss, but an open dataset (with appropriate face/license plate/etc filtering) would be worth that I think.
KartaView and Mapillary are open data Street View alternatives, though they mostly rely on dash cam footage, and thus often don't have fully panoramic views.
There's also OpenDroneMap, which is more drone-focused and captures full 3d point clouds, but that still isn't quite the same as what you're proposing.
I’m not sure that drones are any better than cars in terms of recharging, not to mention local regulations.
The 360 cameras are cheap but getting things accurately localized (if you care about that) and having LiDAR like google has (also if you care about this) is a bit more expensive.
I think one promising route might be to stick a 360 camera on some random cars in exchange for a fee (similar to how ads are put on top of Ubers/Taxis). I bet you could cover a city pretty quick that way, as long as you figure out how to offload the data. Maybe an agreement with a taxi company to plug into the top of the cars a couple times a week.
I doubt the excuse of "security concerns". I think it's more likely that the government didn't want it to be so easy for the rest of the world to see what life was like on the ground. Taking random clicks through Street View, it looks postapocalyptic.
(I'm not blaming it on the people, although I think littering is a choice; almost certainly this is a top-down problem, where corruption in all levels of government is bleeding so much financing away from the people that public services are not operating anywhere close to their potential.)
This makes zero sense. India isn’t North Korea. If you want to see what life on the ground is like, you can just... visit the country. No one’s stopping anyone from doing that.
The security concerns may be overblown (although I can understand why given so many terror attacks in the past), but stopping non-Indian companies from mapping the country so rest of world shouldn’t see the littering sounds like nonsense.
Obviously. But it's considerably easier for anyone with an internet connection to now be able to take a virtual tour; thus, it is much more exposed.
What the street views illustrate is how far behind the key infrastructure is. With a population that is motivated and willing to work hard, it suggests failures at the government level. This has been a global topic for 10 years, but it does not seem to have changed much (while the population has significantly increased).
Street views everywhere just make it easier for management failures to be seen and analyzed. This will hopefully result in some changes and improvements.
I think you’re really overestimating Street View’s impact. Anyone remotely interested in India is already aware of how far behind the key infrastructure is and how governments have failed them. Street View is the last thing they will be looking at for confirmation.
Governments haven’t cared about failures when actual users of the infrastructure (Indian citizens) have complained. Things aren’t going to change because Google is now showing how streets look like for someone outside India.
> Things aren’t going to change because Google is now showing how streets look like for someone outside India.
One can hope that the ease of checking up on ground-level progress would help speed improvement, because global financing organizations might require some OKRs as a condition of participating in financing things or providing aid.
Some time ago I had asked one of my Indian friends (who manages a software team in India and the US and has travelled the world, so he has a varied perspective) what he thinks is the biggest barrier to India's advancement? He said "Corruption. The bureaucracy and the government have so much corruption at so many levels". This sounds like a different way to state your mention of "management failures". Hopefully the additional worldwide scrutiny is a motivator for change.
“Corruption” is an easy scapegoat because it allows the electorate to believe that a new, clean and strong politician can solve all their problems. The reality is combination of low civic sense (why litter in the first place?), under-resourced enforcement (who is going to stop me from littering?), limited funding for infrastructure because of a lack of independent revenue sources available to city administrations, and bad policy that makes city administration effectively a puppet of the state (provincial) governments. In all this, corruption plays a role in making a bad situation worse.
I wanted to say corruption, because that's usually a simple root cause of many such failures... whether it's corruption because of nepotism or graft or just pure theft, the result is delivering something far less than should have been achievable.
However, on the global corruption scale, India is "not so bad". Even so, "not so bad" when applied to a billion+ people is bad.
It looks just like Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Brazil etc. It’s not post apocalyptic, that’s what a lower standard of living looks like. It’s also deceptive. I would say Mumbai is an amazing place to live in, but it wouldn’t be for someone from the first world that looks for very specific metrics of standard. It’s chaotic but it gets the fundamentals right. It’s safe, it’s an economic powerhouse and you can find literally anything you would in the first world.
I disagree. Granted Thailand is big, and Bangkok itself is huge, so I've only seen small parts of a few cities in the country. But while I definitely saw poverty and ramshackle structures, litter was relatively minor. In fact, I've seen worse litter in places in some regions of western Europe. I've definitely seen some bad litter in places in large US cities.
edit - I challenged myself to try to find some really dirty parts of bangkok in street view. I didn't find a good example yet, but I had to laugh when while searching for an example of litter, I instead found a woman cleaning trash - https://www.google.com/maps/@13.7627877,100.4965608,3a,64.2y...
Litter was a much, much bigger problem than it currently is in Indian cities. It’s on the right trajectory. I went to Thailand 8 years ago and there was tons of litter, maybe it was a quick turnaround.
That video is of a rubbish dump, and it's talking about the amount of trash produced by Bangkok. And as Bangkok has about 10 million people, large amounts of trash are expected.
With some quick searching, I found estimates that the US per capita generates between 2 and 7 kg of waste per day per person. Thailand's number is less than 2kg.
I think the special challenge of a city like Bangkok is how rapidly it grew. But as evidenced by improvements in public transport over the last decade, I wouldn't be surprised if waste management had also improved. So perhaps it was much dirtier in the past.
And let's not forget tourism. 22 million people visit Bangkok per year, compared to 14 million for NYC. That's a lot of extra garbage that probably is not counted in the per capita figured.
You should know that Google street view picked up traction around the same time the Mumbai attacks happened.
And that attack was largely coordinated thanks to extensive recce of the city by David headley.
Security concerns were valid because the government had the infrastructure to check the legitimacy of every foreigner entering the country. But a Headley-like recce could be possibly done by anyone from anywhere without the government knowing it.
Yes, there are workarounds, but The government was not wrong in taking it's time in giving clearance to something like this
I can see Street view for few certain areas in Hyderabad. But few areas still show a black screen or I can't navigate the street view. Probably still WIP.
Given the population density, once all the faces and number plates are blurred out the street views are a lot more blurry. But I am really excited to see this.
India really needs its own Google Maps alternative. I spent a while living there and found the near universal dependence on Google Maps to get anywhere a scary amount of reliance on a foreign service. I worry a Google Maps outage, accidental or intensional, could have big consequences on many people's ability to navigate around. (Eventually people will get directions by just asking on the street, but that's gonna be really tough for drivers) Developers in India could make some really cool solutions to the different address system, provide more interesting sources of realtime data, and better support for local languages.
What you're saying feels true for any place though. There's a huge reliance on their maps for getting around anywhere and similarly affected by availability.
Open Street map exists as a dataset to build alternatives on, and I've seen a few like Maps.me which are pretty decent. But it does require crowd sourcing.
Large parts of the former USSR are covered by 2gis.com, which has full offline capability. I think the last time I updated maps on my phone was a couple of years ago (although they publish monthly updates), and it still works fine.
Nokia used to have a first class maps offering in India about a decade (more?) ago. Really well done and complete, for the time. They also had proper voice navigation, even in Indian languages.
But the problem with vendor locked services is that they tend to go down with the vendor. That's why we need a separation between the OS providers, device manufacturers and software providers.
It still exists; Nokia sold it, and now some EU automobile manufacturers own it and maintain it well - https://wego.here.com/ (apps for both android and ios are available, and you can download maps for offline use statewise or for whole of india). English only though.
Of course there is OSM, but also Sygic navigation provides offline maps for whole world, including India. I believe there are also some other similar companies. I don't think we are all dependent on Google.
MapMyIndia does pretty well in the cities at least. I haven't tried it out in tier3 cities and rural areas. Though the traffic information is still better with Google Maps.
Agreed. My dad always asks me what would happen if Maps was shut down? Do we have any alternative service? And I'm not able to give a concrete answer to his question.
Sure there is OSM, but apart from pure locations (which are community led afaik) I don't know of any good reliable service for navigation not reliant on Google.
Edit: Apart from Apple Maps as well. Just in case someone points out the major competitor.
Apple maps isn't the real competitor to Google Maps in India. It is HERE - https://www.here.com/applications/wego ... Google was forced to offer offline maps in India and EU because the Here apps offered it for a long time. (Apple maps still doesn't but it has a slight advantage over Here in that it licensed data from JustDial, an online yellow pages services, and so it can show the location of many retail and other commercial outlets better). Here had Nokia as a stakeholder, but is now owned by consortium of EU automobile manufacturers.
Apple Maps is honestly no where close to Google Maps. Especially in dense Indian cities with multiple roads to reach a place, some roads are not even there on Apple Maps. It also (like OSM) lacks in contact details of businesses, open/close time, etc. which are a real value add for Google Maps.
All the map data of google is public, it's probably been copied/vectorized/etc, add some errors to it, remove some streets, shift the street a meter or two, you got a comparable service. Probably google has a lot of checksums in there to see if it's their data you're drawing, but since maps is almost an essential service I don't think they can abruptly remove it without consequences, one of which would be to allow a new service even on stolen data.
Scraping Google's maps tile by tile would take forever, and you'd never be able to keep up with the daily changes submitted by users, much less the network effects (traffic, live busyness, reviews, speed traps, etc.)
Apple Maps wasn't super helpful for me when I was there. Even within cities. They don't have a big enough team on the ground (yet?) to detail the maps out
OpenStreetMap data is better for routing than it is for location lookups.
In the US, there will be the occasional problem where some local street detail is wrong, but things like inter-city routing work great. You can do it on device with several different apps, and there are several different providers selling route calculation as a service that use OpenStreetMap data.
This is the first time I'm hearing that OSM is better for routing. Will have to check on the available apps on Play Store and from the list given by @matkoniecz there is only mapy.cz which had the navigation and the app experience was subpar for me.
There's an Android app called StreetComplete that asks users to fill in information about stuff that's around them, and uploads it to OSM. For example, verifying street numbers on buildings, down to verifying the material the sidewalks are made of.
If there's a home developed alternative, it is significantly more likely to experience outages than Google's offering, given how terrible gov. services are in the country.
Wanna withdraw money from a Post Office? Be prepared to return back empty-handed because "Link down" or gov. employees watching cricket matches.
There is a cultural angle as well here. Unlike America, it's quite common and acceptable in India to just ask someone directions which helps with the last mile directions so India doesn't need a perfect map solution, just a good enough one.
Google maps is bad for hiking because they generate most of their map data from what the street view cars can see, and cars can't go down hiking trails.
It is bad because it is niche not very profitable sector. At least not Google-scale profitable.
And many hikers care A LOT about hiking and their maps. Hiking and cycling data in OSM is extremely good, as result of many such people being interested in project - as mappers and as users of data, including software creation.
When Google maps started this was the case... But now only a tiny proportion is third party data (some business listings, some transit data, various icons and logos, ads)
A quick try, holding the little yellow figure out over first Agra and then Delhi, it appears only a patchy subset of streets have been pictured as yet. Very specific neighborhoods, with large blank areas between.
That won't work well with geoguessr, were you like to "drive" along a road for a while looking at signs.
Cool. I once did a streetview based art project, noplacetosit, that was initially inspired by the Ginsberg poem: "on Jessore road, long bamboo huts, no place to shit but sand channel ruts."
Only the Instagram account is still up, at the moment, which doesn't do justice to the large panoramas. This development might make me revisit the project, get some fresh locations, and upload the larger photos.
Most of these street view imagery was done by private individuals, in private spaces. Security and Privacy concerns didn't allow google to send Google's camera down the streets snapping pictures. Which imo is not a bad position to take, I wonder what changed.
I hope it comes with the option of fuzzing out houses on demand. I believe Germany has this feature? Since law enforcement is so weak here, I don't want Google Maps to create a privacy nightmare.
What excatly is the privacy nightmare of a static frontal picture of your house? Because of the concerns of the german population Google canned StreetView in Germany, which is a shame IMHO.
Let's say you apply for a job. They ask you for an address, and you give it to them. Most bosses may be cool people, but some of them tend to pry. If they get to see the street view of your house at the click of a button, they can estimate how rich/poor your family is, and can use it against you. For example, if the job applicant comes from a very poor family, they may play hard-ball with salary negotiations.
Or your sister posts a pic of herself on Instagram, showing a quarter of the house-front. Some random creep who recognizes the locality can use street-view to narrow down where she lives. All from the comfort of his own home.
There is a 'report a problem' link in the ⋮ (vertical ellipsis, three dots) menu. From there you should be able to request blurring for people and houses etc.
You'll have to do it several times, because usually not all years are done at once, and not all angles. I think I had to report it five times or so.
Finally. As a "starving software developer", I can't really afford to travel the world. Luckily we live in an age where something like Google Maps is possible. I've traveled everywhere I want to go from my desk chair.
Looking at Google Maps in India right now, I'm seeing a lot of blank/black views, and navigation along streets seems broken. So maybe they had to implement custom logic for this, and it isn't fully baked.
It's a work in progress. They've only announced "street views" for 10 indian cities so far. I guess data is still being collected and processed before it will be available for the whole country in Google Maps.
I miss the days when Google Maps was frequently adding (relatively) dense coverage for new countries. I guess they decided the economics weren't there for it.
[0]: https://www.geoguessr.com/