What’s Behind Google Maps and Its Map Building Process, In a Detailed Interview

The folks of The Atlantic did an interview with Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, who started everything by saying that the offline world, the real world has so much info that’s not online, so they try to bridge the gap between the real world and online world. Maps is the centerpiece of that, which is an interesting point of view.

Mapping systems on phones have become vital nowadays, being the interface between the offline and online worlds. Google and Apple will be battling it out now, since Apple opted to use its own system instead of Google Maps, so the promise is big there and the potential. Google has all the tools to win this, simply by being the giant that it is. People are used to Google Maps, it’s their second nature already and it’s already incorporated into so many apps.

As far as background goes, the building where the people responsible with this fantastic work develop Maps every day has free food, ping pong and even cartoons inspired by Google Maps. It’s an office building off the 101 Mountain View and also part of the interview I mentioned was former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who spent a lot of time on the Google Mars project. They put the reporters through the map making process, that involves acquiring data through partners, engineering the data in the right format and compiling it with other sources of data. Then there’s the hand massage of the data and finally the result is the sum of all these parts.

It all started with TIGER data from the US Census Bureau and evolved into the 3D mapping system that’s Google Maps today. More details in the source link below, for a fantastic interview!