Why does google.es not update their 7 years old satellite images. They just change the year written on the images from 2004 to 2011 and this on 7 years old satellite images of our area. We have a company and have finished a huge building for our company in august 2008. Google.es is still showing images from 2004 of our area. We have emailed, send letters, send faxes, called, actually done everything we could to kindly ask them to update their satellite image of our area. We have absolutely no response. They just changes the year written on the images to 2011 even the images are from 2004. This is actually very bad for our business as people when they search our company cannot find our company, see our building, on google earth or google maps. All they see is an empty piece of land and now the image say 2011 even it is from 2004, which has worsen the situation for us. People might believe we are a fraud company there do not exist. Why are google.es doing this?
I wonder why!
We are loosing business because of this!
Google doesn’t take the pictures. They just buy rights to whatever aerial images are available. If there aren’t any to buy, they can’t update them. And by “the year written on the images,” do you mean the copyright date? That appears to be the copyright on the mapping system as a whole, not the specific image(s) you’re looking at.
I really doubt that you are losing business because you’re in a building too new to show up in aerial photos.
Google doesn’t send out an airplane to take one picture of a building on request. They contract for or purchase aerial photography of big areas all at once. Is it possible that you are located in a rural area that normally sees little change, or near mountains or military facilities that make flying difficult?
The date displayed is a copyright date covering all the possible information displayed in a particular scene, from street names to business listings. It doesn’t indicate the year of the aerial photo.
I was under the impression that most of their in-close images were aerial photos. The cost of flying aerial photos is expensive and usually only done when a government has a need (and the money), such as for census data and for fire protection or natural resources issues. The areas I work in have only been flow 4 or 5 times since the 1940’s
I just went to google.es and looked at the photos of my neighborhood in the USA, and it does show many recent changes.
I suggest that you might try google.com instead of google.es and look at your area, and see if you get the old pictures or more up-to-date pictures. If google.com shows up-to-date pictures, then you are correctly blaming google.es. But if you see the same thing on both sites, then google isn’t doing anything wrong, and they are simply limited by what it available, as the posters above explained.
The images are the same for google.anycountrydomain; the culprits here are the Spanish government (not necessarily Madrid, for example in Navarra the latest pics were paid for by the regional government), not Google.
Personally I do wish Google would update their databases to be able to display dual-language names better, but they do not take the pics.
ETA: I am posting this from a building in Madrid, which in Google appears as a construction site, and which is set on a street that does not have its name shown on either Google maps, tontones of at least three different brands, or City of Madrid paper maps (the Thick Book kind). I’m reasonably sure Madrid City Hall are the ones responsible for the namelessness.
How much are you paying Google for this service? I suspect the level of response you get will be directly tied to this information.
Regardless of the satellite image being outdated, you should still be able to get your business listed on the google map. Have you tried contacting the Google Local Business Centre.
My pool isn’t on Google Maps. All I see is grass. Please send a plane immediately.
That used to be true. Aerial photos were exotic things, hard for mapmakers like myself to get easy access to, and flown in spring “leaf-off” conditions so we could see the roads and sidewalks, etc. Now the mapping and real estate sites have popularized aerials, but people want pretty summertime aerials. That makes it very tough to see the streets in a heavily wooded city like Atlanta, much less the bike paths through a forest preserve. Rural areas often went decades between overflights, but now they’re updated about every five years in most of the US, and metro areas every other year or so.
Different sites use different vendors and update areas at different times. It’s always worth checking Bing Maps, Yahoo, and NAVTEQ as well as Google Maps. Flashearth.com used to allow you to compare several services, but they no longer can use the Google tiles.