Here?s What Goes Into Making Google Maps, Will Apple Be Able To Recalculate?

Everywhere you turned last week, there was another story about iOS 6 Maps. Some feel like it’s a great new direction for Apple, but people like me feel like we’re left with an ugly experience that shouldn’t have been introduced to the public in its current state. sh Yes, Google Maps was removed from iOS 6, but we’ve known that for quite a while now. What we didn’t know was that Apple would make no real improvements on its own offering from the second developers starting tinkering with the OS until the day it was made public. As I tried to use Apple Maps for the first time with the first developers version, it felt very unpolished and not well thought out. That’s rare for Apple, so I figured that things would get better. Sadly, they didn’t. Google Maps has been a major player in the maps space since it launched almost eight years ago. I had no idea what went into making the product, or more importantly, keeping the product up to date. Luckily, the team allowed me to take the same glance at its processes that a few other publications recently had, but a bit more. As you listen to the company speak, it reiterates its mission of “organizing the world’s information”, but it rarely talks about how that organization actually happens. I took a look and was pretty impressed. Is it something Apple can catch up to quickly? Let’s see, shall we? Merging the virtual and real-world After I sat down with Jack Menzel of Google’s Search team, he walked me through how the product has come along, along with plans and ideas for the future. I was able to do the very same thing with the Maps team on Friday. Both products are changing the way we interact with the physical world around us. It all starts with a project called “Ground Truth”, which is Google Map’s team that takes all 1,300 sources of map data and merges them into a consumable product that we see on the web and our mobile phones today. It’s not a simple process, but it’s one that is fantastically tricky, involved, complex and yet…full of common sense. Imagine getting files of junk from every source of topographical information in the world and then having to normalize it for your world-class system that services millions of users. It’s involved, multi-layer and

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