Google invests to improve map quality
David October 14th, 2008
Despite being a free service to its users, Google invests a lot to improve the services and quality of its mapping service and to distinguish themselves from their competitors’ mapping services. Most recently, this investment has included a new orbiting satellite, GeoEye-1, that captures photos previously only available to government sponsored intelligence agencies. But even with their own satellite, the US government has legally restricted their resolution to 50cm. (I’m sure that the military doesn’t want Google or other companies taking high resolution aerial photos of secure locations)