Did Street View capture images of Phillip Garrido…?

 

You can read Jaycee’s story on Wikipedia (or almost any news site), but the short version is that she was kidnapped in 1991 and wasn’t found for 18 years! Police visited Garrido’s house various times over the years, but never looked in the back yard where Dugard was being held.

Viewing the home in Google Earth (KML) doesn’t show much, but if you switch to Street View mode you’ll see Garrido pull out of his driveway and follow the Street View car down the road.

 

garrido.jpg 

To get that close-up shot of him, continue south down Walnut and then west on Bown until you reach Viera Ave. At that stop sign, he gets right up behind the StreetView car as shown above. Of course, there’s a chance that this isn’t Phillip, but it seems quite likely that it is — it’s his van, coming from his house, and it’s a male driving.

There have been a handful of famous people (possibly) spotted in Street View, but this is certainly one of the most high-profile. For other interesting sites in Street View, check out StreetViewFun or the Street View section on Google Earth Hacks.

Google Places: Google Removes Spam

It appears that Google has removed most but not all review spam from the Moishe’s Moving System’s Places page and from many of the other Places pages affected by this scam. On Moishe’s Places page, the spam that remains (besides their response spam) was posted between July 1 and July 3 and seems to still affect 35 or so other moving companies nationwide. Whether Google just removed the spam affecting the most companies or it is still a work in progress is not yet clear. Kudos to Google for moving on this problem.

Here are a few samples of the spam that still remains and is affecting moving companies country wide:

Another interesting sidelight is that Google is not alone in having been hit with this spam. According to Google’s index, Superpages has been seeing this stuff since February, 2010. It is also present in Rateitall.com, Judy’s Book, Yellowbot, InsiderPages, MyMovingReviews and  Kudzu starting last fall and continuing into early this year. While this dreck is visible in all of these sites, it is much less pervasive than at Google. Whether it was already taken down elsewhere or the extortionists are just ramping up their game is not yet clear.

Fake reviews are a problem whether perpetrated by the businesses themselves or by others attempting to gain advantage at the expense of the business. The answer to the problem is not totally clear but a solution probably will need a number of components:

  • More FTC enforcement and education
  • Better filtering algorithms on the part of the search engines
  • Improved and more viable business complaint options, dispute resolution and removal mechanisms.

Google Places is not the only environment in which this abuse is taking place. But Google can and should provide a lead in developing an exemplary review environment that is fair to the public and fair to the businesses being reviewed.

The News in the AJAX Map Control

 

The new modules add some very handy features, and they really show off the dynamic module loading capabilities of the AJAX 7.0 control by adding functionality when you need it, and getting out of the way when you don’t.

The new modules help you:

Calculate driving directions using the new Microsoft.Maps.Directions module. This makes it easier than ever to integrate driving, transit, and walking directions into your applications. Try it now (Interactive SDK).

Display a venue map using the Microsoft.Maps.VenueMaps module.  Venue maps show details of what’s going on inside malls, airports, and shopping districts.  Now you can show your customers not just where the building is, but exactly where your store is located inside.  This is one of the most popular consumer features on Bing Maps today and now you can make it part of your apps as well.Try it now (Interactive SDK).

Show current traffic on the map using the Microsoft.Maps.Traffic module.  Not only does this module make it easier to show traffic conditions, the new traffic overlays that shipped with v1.2 of the road map style look better than ever. Try it now (Interactive SDK).

But that’s not all, if you are doing advanced map development then we hope you will find these new features helpful:

Set polyline and polygon stroke dash. To further customize your shapes, use the new property strokeDashArray of the PolylineOptions Object and PolygonOptions Object.

New tile layer property and event. Ensure the best performance of your tile layer during animation by modifying the new animationDisplay property of the TileLayerOptions Object. Also, determine when your tile layer is fully downloaded using the new tiledownloadcomplete event.

New map options. For increased flexibility, new options showBreadcrumb, disableBirdseye, disablePanning, and disableZooming have been added to the MapOptions Object. Try it now (Interactive SDK).

Before we sign off we wanted to acknowledge those who have seen the new “locate me” function implemented onBing Maps and asked when developers will be able to do the same.  The good news is that it’s already live today, just check out Get User Location functions.

Also, you might have noticed that in this post we are linking directly to features on the Interactive SDK.  We received lots of requests from developers for this feature when we released the iSDK back in May, and so we’ve redone the site to make that possible.