This is not out in the middle of nowhere (which is usually covered anyway), these are (a few, admittedly) streets here in San Francisco. How many years have they been doing street view? My little nothing street gets re-shot every couple of years, it seems. But in some neighborhoods there are blocks that apparently have never been covered; most of Hunter’s Point is blank (for street view, not for maps) as one of the biggest examples. Now, large parts of Hunter’s Point may be derelict, I’m not sure, but there are other obviously populated blocks that just don’t have street view. Take the 1500 block of Revere Avenue, for example.
So what’s up with that? Anybody know? Or care to guess?
Here’s an interesting article from Computerworld from July 2015, and it mentions Hunter’s Point as well as areas in the Sunset District and other places in San Francisco. But the main message in this article about these gaps in street view is that Google isn’t talking about them.
I’ve also seen cases where there’s new imagery at one particular intersection, but move one step away from that intersection in any direction, and it’s only old imagery (I was able to detect this one by extensive renovations being done on one building, which showed up only in the intersection shot). The camera car had to travel down at least one and probably two of those road legs to get the new shots of the intersection; why didn’t it get other shots in the process?
On re-checking the intersection I’m thinking of, it looks like it’s all more up-to-date now (newer even than what the intersection had before), so I can’t give an example.
If there’s a privacy request for a particular address, they just blur the house. That was done to the house in Cleveland where the kidnapping victims were found.
(IMO it just attracts more attention. If I see a blurred house in my area I immediately go to the county property website to see what I can figure out about the weirdo who lives there.)
How many people are busily at work at Gooble, manually locating every request to blot something out and taking the necessary steps?. Like a highway sign pointing directions to three cities, and somebody has blotted one out, or blotting out the distance to one city but not the other.
The thing with these gaps of entire blocks is that, if there was no updated image, older images would still be there. Google at one point in that article seems to be suggesting that some older images contained problems such that when a newer image tried to overlay it, both images disappeared. Or something.
I don’t think it has anything to do with individual houses or people being blurred out. If you go by the corner of one of these missing blocks on the crossing street, you can see partway down the missing block and things aren’t blurred out.
p.s. Ellen Cherry, I don’t think this question has a real answer that anyone on this board has access to, and that the thread was better off where it was. But it probably won’t go anywhere anyway, so whatevs. Not meant as a criticism in any way.
I’ve seen this too. I’ve seen intersections that were upgraded to roundabouts, but I can see the old intersection by going down one or more of the approaching streets and turning the view around. I’ve also seen cases where the streetlevel views are all the old intersection, but there’s a low-level aerial view that has the new roundabout. I wonder if they specially send out planes to gather such imagres when there’s been a significant change to a street, but they don’t have a car scheduled to go through that place soon.
I’ve seen a similar phenomenon with Google Earth. If I look at a particular spot, and then zoom in, the pictures at successive magnifications are sometimes clearly different, as one was an older image and another is newer.
The most noticeable examples are cases where a building appears at one magnification, but at another magnification there’s nothing but an empty field there.
I first noticed this while looking at Livermore (CA) airport. There’s a brand new pilot lounge building next to the old lounge and a large one-story building across the street from that. Zoom in for a better view, and the new pilot lounge and the building across the street are just empty fields.
Subsequently, I’ve found other examples of that sort of thing.
The overall punch line here is that each imagery source and each zoom level are independent projects crawling around the world at their own pace on their own schedule. There is no direct attempt to create a point-in-time coherent snapshot of an area.
The nature of both air & ground reconnaissance is that nearby stuff *tends *to be captured together. But there’s always an edge. And omissions, mistakes, and all the rest.
Total WAG, but I suspect the vast majority of manpower is out in the field gathering images and there’s almost no humans back at HQ looking at any of it. The software sucks up the new data, pastiches it into the existing database and that’s about it.
IMO manpower is spent improving the software, but human QC of the data itself simply doesn’t scale. So back to the OP’s specific issue, there’s dirty data in their database, they know it, but it simply isn’t a priority to go in and fix it. So it sits there blocking updates of some trivial fraction of their entire data blob. Which is “close enough good enough” from their POV.
I have stumbled across a few of these which turned out to be blocks where a “celebrity” lived. Seems counterproductive in a way. If a stalker is guessing a neighborhood where their target might be living and GMaps goes blank in one spot, they’ve narrowed their search down.
I’m just hear to mourn the loss of my favorite street view artifact. There used to be a street in my town, where if you followed the street view line, it took you into a gas station and back out. Sadly, that’s been corrected.
Sometimes it’s because the streets are privately owned. In central London there are a few little cul-de-sacs that I think may be on Google Maps now but weren’t previously because for all the surrounding streets they had permission from the local council but that did not extend to the private roads.