Google Map Maker: Why it failed?

Google introduce innovative programs and applications. Google knows exactly house online space to provide better services to the users. In 2005, Google developers launched the Google Maps service.

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Google Maps application offer en route map to all users to reach any destination without wasting time or going into the wrong directions. The Google maps tool gained a lot of popularity and were a really successful service worldwide. Google map maker was an attempt of Google to extend its reach to many unexplored locations.

What is Google Map? Google Map Maker is a map editor develops by Google in June 2008.  The program allows users to add and edit location. But, sadly the application was eventually discontinued in March 2017.

Why Google map maker was launched?

Google map maker was developed to reach places where it was hard to find the correct data for the maps. Thereby, the only purpose was to improve the map quality through users’ inputs or contributions. For this purpose, Google map maker was introduced. Google map maker allowed its users to edit and add features like railway lines, roads, etc. on the available existing map to promote accuracy.

Features and interface of Google Map Maker

• Google map maker allowed its users to draw locations like rivers, roads, buildings, services etc. on the map directly.
• 3 types of drawing tools were present in it, Line for denoting railways, roads etc.
• Placemark for marking a single point on the map and polygon for showing large locations like borders and lakes.
• There were tools like find and browse, which allowed the users to make changes about any locations on the map.
• The extensive features like map, satellite and integration allow contributors to access the satellite imagery, map data or all together in a particular area.

Discontinuation of Google Map Maker

In November 2016, Google announced that Google map maker will be discontinued and will be merged will Google maps itself. By March 2017, the service of Google map maker was officially closed. Reasons for discontinuing Google map maker was that –

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• The joint approach of users and Google was to use satellite images to track areas like roads, etc. but this idea failed in areas with poor satellite and users eventually couldn’t create correct data for the maps in those places.
•  Since the excess grant was given to the users, it started to get misused by many users like private information of users was leaked, prank features began to grow, etc, the vandalism incident in 2015 was one such example of it. Though after such incidents, Google had disabled features like user moderation and auto-approval.
•  Initially, to avoid vandalism and maintain quality, experienced contributors and reviewers used to monitor new additions in map maker but with time it was directly posted on the map without prior investigation.
• Many big features took a lot of time to appear on the map since there were server issues.