Does someone travel every single area and manually input information or…? I feel so stupid
asking this lol.
In: Technology
someone manually entered all the information.
you can actually buy paper maps with street names, so thats what google started with.
then pretty much anyone can become a “local guide” and add locations to google maps.
as for people traveling every area, thats how they got steetview
Yes.
I used to work for a company that had a similar app for truckers. There are companies that sell this map data, but we still had to do some work on top of what we bought. Apple and Google are doing similar things.
They can start with public plans that show the major city streets and roads. But getting up-to-date versions of those is tough. I know for sure Google has cars set up that drive the actual roads to make sure everything is up to date. Waze has an “editing mode” where a user can drive on roads it doesn’t know about to help them add new streets faster. I’m sure Apple is doing something similar to Google.
Users report a lot of data, too. They don’t instantly use that information, but if 10 people report a speed trap it’s probably actually there. If 50 people submit a building name, it’s probably correct. Etc.
It’s a huge job, but one advantage they have is while stuff is frequently *added* it’s very seldom *removed*. Roads don’t tend to get removed or destroyed. So once they put a road in the system they don’t generally have to check on it again for a while.
For Google Street view, yes they do drive a car around with cameras on. For the street names, stop signs etc, that information is available on mapping somewhere that Google probably paid to access.
On top of everyone else’s comment that there are databases of this information for sale… Do you wanna know another way they get it?
Have you ever been asked to “Select all squares containing a stop sign”?
The computer matched that up with the location that picture was taken at. Crowdsourced data labeling.
alot of people, third parties, and time
they get data from satelite imagery, governments, the google cars etc you see on the road, user reporting for issues, and some human tweaking after alot of data cleansing
[https://blog.google/products/maps/google-maps-101-how-we-map-world/](https://blog.google/products/maps/google-maps-101-how-we-map-world/)
building names businesses are most often reported by users or business owners adding their address in a business profile to google
speed cameras on the road are typically reported by users, alot easier in something like waze, which google would be sharing alot of data with
i believe google is partnered with ESRI, and ESRI is “big data”, hosting much of the data for most municipalities and governments in north america & europe, so I imagine a lot of that infrastructure information could be shared between companies. I have nothing to back this up, but in this day and age data is king and ESRI owns the castle when it comes to municipal/government spatial data
Before Google and Apple provided free navigation apps we had personal navigation devices and builtin car navigation systems with comprehensive maps. The revenue from hardware sales and map updates supported two multi billion companies, Navteq and Teleatlas, that compiled map data for the most developed countries. They did drive around everywhere with two people in each data collection car, a driver and a data collection person making voice and text notes. The notes were later computer and human processed to the final digital map database.
Google basically did the same but replaced the data collection person with video recorders and automated recognition of road signs and house numbers. Some hard to recognize house numbers and street names are automatically recognized with [CAPTCHAs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA). Google presents the same image to many people. If most of them recognize the same number or letter that’s considered a valid recognition result. Besides that Google had [Google Map Maker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker) program open to absolutely everybody. Once they started to dominate in some countries they were able to buy manually collected data from companies like Navteq and Teleatlas because the business of map data collection started to collapse. Apple bought initial data from Teleatlas.
Google and Apple still have to drive around to continue improving data but they can be smart about where and when they drive. They can ask users if data is wrong or detect errors automatically for example if users don’t follow navigation guidance.
Waze is curated mostly by volunteer editors. It went global in 2009 and they started with a basemap from paid sources. Now after a decade and a half of tweaks by the volunteers, their maps are some of the most accurate. Google bought Waze so they can bring that high quality map data over to Google Maps
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