Google Street View is dying before our eyes
Since its inception, Google has been known for its innovative ideas. In 2005, when Google Maps launched, it had another one: It would hire drivers to travel the world and take street-level images from every possible country. Google’s aim was to provide the world with quality street view images to help people scope out where they were going, or simply to let people enjoy seeing the world from a ground-level view.
That was the goal then. In 2021, Google no longer has any interest in the quality of its product.
Google launched street view in 2007 and originally only had areas of the United States covered. Over the years, Google extended its coverage into other countries. Some nations had privacy concerns when Google covered them. Germany, for instance, only has coverage in its largest cities because of these privacy issues, and Japan and Switzerland demanded the camera on the car be lower because of privacy invasion fears.
The cameras available at the time were extremely grainy, and if one wanted to read signs with even moderately sized text, they could forget about it. These cameras were replaced in 2010, but while many cities received numerous updates in future years, some rural areas in the United States and Australia remain stuck with this primitive, low-quality imagery. It would be great if Google could cover these places again, but it’s not the biggest issue with the service.
Google has used four “generations” of cameras for street view, each with its own identifiable look. Google will likely no longer have a need for a fifth generation, not because quality won’t improve, but because fans of street view will do Google’s job for free. And therein lies the monster that is consuming Google Street View.
Google Street View’s demise began in October 2017, when Google announced it was loaning cameras to people to make their own street view coverage. This led to people purchasing cameras, driving around to get images and sending them back to Google for publication. However, these cameras rival Google’s first cameras in terms of shoddiness, and movement on maps is incredibly slow, as a user can only progress one frame at a time instead of the multiple frames they can use with official Google coverage.
In December 2020, Google made it even easier for anyone to ruin street view. People can now use an app on their phones to record a series of images as they drive down a road. This will almost certainly lead to eager drivers covering up quality photos at a speed never seen before.
In the past, Google would make the most recent image of a particular place the one that shows up by default. If one is using Google Maps on their computer browser, they can see older pictures of some areas by clicking the small clock icon on the top left of the page. But unofficial coverage now seems to take precedence over official coverage: In many instances, a person will have to manually change the year to a later one to have official coverage of decent quality. Why would Google purposely make its own content harder to access? Your guess is as good as mine.
The use of third-party services has also made Google less willing to cover new countries, and there are many that could use quality coverage. Google’s journey to detail every country has devolved into an optional side quest to have a non-player character cover a couple miles of a country if they feel like it, and Google will never touch it afterward.
Not only is this harmful to consumers of street view when they are looking for a destination, but players and mapmakers of the popular internet game GeoGuessr are feeling the problems as well. GeoGuessr is a game where players are placed in a random street view location around the world and have to guess their location. When Google replaces a location with unofficial coverage, it forces the mapmaker to remove the location, and since Google does not give notices of when it is adding, removing or replacing coverage, it is up to the players and mapmakers to notice it themselves, often resulting in an unsuspecting player having a “broken round” where nothing shows up.
If I owned a business and wanted people to see it, I wouldn’t be happy if the coverage made it look like garbage. But this is the direction Google has decided to take. Every day, more official Google coverage is getting replaced with low-quality third-party imagery, and there are no indications that Google is going to change its course. If you are a person who uses Google Street View often, you might not notice much yet, but you should lock your doors and bolt your windows, because this third-party behemoth could have its eye on your turf next.
