[talk-ph] Google Maps are generally surprisingly inaccurate

[riber101-osm at yahoo.com]

Hi fellow OSM mappers!

As a newbie you might wonder why to invest your effort in OSM rather than Google Maps that seems to be present everywhere.

Well, Google currently have better general coverage than OSM here in the Philippines.

Try to compare Laoag City http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/index.html?mt0=googlemap&mt1=mapnik&lon=120.59&lat=18.19&z=14 and you will see how "far" Google is ahead.

So why use OSM?

Because:
	* OSM maps are in general more accurate than Google Maps
	* OSM will eventually be much more detailed than Google for all of the Philippines
	* The maps are free for everybody to use - now and in the future
	* OSM is snowballing and right now is gaining momentum that will ensure it will see more and more public and official use
	* You are not helping Google increase their income from adds


I have just finished adding road names to Bay Breeze in Taguig and adjusted the traces of the roads to fit a trace I did.

Basically I have been there on my bike, up and down every road and taken geocoded photos of every street sign.

I KNOW the area by now. When I did a compare with Google after finishing the job I found that Google had missed 30% of the roads in the area.

I recently had a similar experience when mapping Valley View where Google had roads not connected, missing, and roads where no roads where.

Personally I like the rendering in Google and their availability in software, on the internet and on phones.

But I had a wake up call cause the mapping done by Google mappers is almost solely based on satellite images by people WITHOUT local knowledge.

I tried to sign up for Google Mapmaker to make a few corrections to my neighbourhood. Now more than a week after I'm still not able to make the desired changes because of Google's moderator system. People from India, with absolutely NO local knowledge, moderate my changes and comment that they don't correspond to the satellite image!

Google's mapmaker is a nightmare. If you add a GPS trace it's impossible to draw a road on top. The moderator system makes it very hard to make adjustments that are not supported by the satellite images.

So basically Google Mapmaker is nothing more than getting people to convert their satellite images to maps for free. So in general, those areas of the world where Google Mapmaker is available APPEARS to have good map coverage, but the QUALITY is abysmal.

By making it so hard to make changes to Google Map Google are shooting themselves in the foot. Their maps will remain LOW QUALITY.


However one thing Google does well is making it very easy to enter POI and standardise on the information that can be stored for their maps.


Anyway, if OSM publicly get know for lower coverage, but accurate mapping, then more and more people will begin using OSM and assist in maintaining the OSM map.

Happy mapping
Sehested
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