The Spammy Closed Listing Labels on Google Maps

The New York Times published a story about business listings on Google Maps that are incorrectly being labeled as closed as a result of spam. We thought it’d be helpful to share our view about this recent issue and directly assure business owners and Maps users that we’re actively working on a solution.

Every year, millions of businesses open, close, move, change their hours, get a new website, or make other types of changes. Because we can’t be on the ground in every city and town, we enable our great community of users to let us know when something needs to be updated. The vast majority of edits people have made to business listings have improved the quality and accuracy of Google Maps for the benefit of all Maps users.

For example, when there is a pending edit that indicates that a place might be closed, our system currently displays the label, “Reported to be closed. Not true?”. Only when that pending edit is reviewed and approved does the label change to, “This place is permanently closed. Not true?”.

About two weeks ago, news in the blogosphere made us aware that abuse — such as “place closed” spam labels — was occurring. And since then, we’ve been working on improvements to the system to prevent any malicious or incorrect labeling. These improvements will be implemented in the coming days.

We know that accurate listings on Google Maps are an important tool for many business owners. We take reports of spam and abuse very seriously and do our best to ensure the accuracy of a listing before updating it. That being said, we apologize to both business owners and users for any frustration this recent issue of spam labeling has caused, and we’re committed to making sure that users and potential customers continue to have the most up-to-date and accurate information possible.

SketchUp World in 3D

 

A new website called Your World in 3D to help introduce users to the concept of geo-modeling – the term given to creating 3D buildings for Google Earth and Google Maps. Today, they’re releasing the Your World in 3D website in 15 additional languages: Czech, German, English (UK), Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Porteguese, Russian, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

 

 

User generated models from around the worldBesides being fun, building your town in 3D is a great way to show civic pride, encourage tourism for your town, and promote your business. 3D modeling has also been used in crisis response situations as we saw in the grassroots modeling effort that happened after the earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy.

 

To see the site in another language, use the drop-down menu in the bottom of any pageYour World in 3D has all the tools you’ll need to start geo-modeling and features several examples of what fellow modeling. By releasing Your World in 3D in more languages, we hope that you and your friends from around the globe will join us to help build the most comprehensive 3D virtual mirror of planet Earth.

GoogleSketchUpBlog

Google Code-in Winners Arrive at the Googleplex

Earlier this month the Google Open Source Programs Office hosted the Grand Prize winners of the Google Code-in contest, a contest designed to introduce pre-university students (age 13-18) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. Students worked on many types of task including: writing or refactoring code, documentation, translations, outreach/marketing, quality assurance (testing), conducting research, training, and user experience research. Students earned points for each task they completed, with the top 14 point accumulators winning a trip for themselves and a parent to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

Day 1
Upon their arrival in the San Francisco Bay area, students had their first meet-and-greet dinner at their hotel near Google. Many students had worked with the same open source organizations so they had ‘seen’ each other in chat rooms, on IRC, and on group lists but this was the first time the students actually met one another. The bonding began right away as students quickly started moving tables together as more students arrived so that all of the students could talk to each other.


Day 2
Students and parents spent the next day at the Googleplex. The morning began with an introduction by Google Code-in Program Manager, Carol Smith, congratulating the students on their achievements and giving them a talk on Google Summer of Code, our worldwide program for university student developers giving them stipends to write code for various open source software projects.

Next, the students were treated to a talk by Alan Eustace, Google Senior Vice President of Knowledge. Alan discussed the evolution of search and where we go from here.

Three engineers in our Open Source Programs Office, Shawn Pearce, Junio Hamano and Dave Borowitz, chatted with the students about their roles at Google, their work in open source and specifically with Git.

Lilli Thompson, Game Developer Advocate for Google, discussed her role at Google and her experience as an engineer in the gaming industry.

Lunchtime at Google’s largest cafe was next on the agenda followed by a tour of the Google campus. One of the stops on the way was the picturesque front lawn of Mr. Android, complete with all of his releases: cupcake, donut, eclair, fro-yo, gingerbread and honeycomb. Perfect place for a photo op….


…then on to the Google onsite store to pick up some fun schwag to take home to friends and family.

When the students arrived back to our conference room they were welcomed with large plush bug-droids, compliments of Dan Morrill and the Android team. Dan chatted about Android and took questions from the students and parents.

Jutta Degener discussed her job as a Software Engineer working on the Borg cluster management system.

Jeremy Allison, co-creator of Samba and Open Source Programs team member, engaged the group in a lively discussion about why open source development is important to the world and the important role these students can play in the years to come.

Chris DiBona, Manager of open source at Google, encouraged the students to continue working on open source software development as they move into university. He also discussed the importance of open source software at Google and more history on the Google Summer of Code program. Then it was time for the awards ceremony for these amazing students. Chris DiBona presented each student with their engraved, very substantial (ie. heavy) awards.

We wrapped up the day with chief Java architect and Open Source Programs Office team member, Josh Bloch, running through a few Java puzzlers with the students.

Day 3
Students spent the next day of their trip in San Francisco enjoying a behind the scenes tour at the California Academy of Sciences complete with a planetarium show. To have energy for their next adventure, the group filled up on chocolate ice cream and banana splits at Ghirardelli Chocolate shop. Then the parents and students spent 2.5 hours on segways touring around Fisherman’s Wharf and the North Beach neighborhood.


The students traveled to Northern California from 8 countries: Austria, Brazil, Canada, India, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Romania, Turkey, and the United States. This group was a great representation of the talented students around the globe interested in open source software development.

The students left all of us in the Open Source Programs Office feeling lucky to have met these rising stars in the open source world. We hope to see them again in Google Summer of Code (once they are old enough) and at future open source events around the world. We’re sure this is not the last we’ll hear of these bright, hardworking, humble, gracious young adults.