131–140 of 196 posts
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Is that the ugly one where you have to download huge regions to offline just to look at where you at right now?
Huge? Not so much... OsmAnd uses vector maps, which are very small, compared to "offline" Google Maps tiles. A couple hundred megabytes for an entire country's road system is not "huge".
I do a lot of Google Maps moderation and there’s a ton of bad changes being attempted every day. Honestly I’m amazed Google doesn’t bother to vet anyone really. Becoming a local guide is easy and not that difficult for a spam group to create enough fake accounts to get things pushed through. Just last night I caught the local Target that was reclassified as a “prison”. What Google needs to do is lock information for…
Google already let's people claim their maps listing via Google My Business. I would be shocked if they couldn't lock edits, or at the very least review them. I hope Google uses their Duplex tech to review phone number changes though, should be easy to call the existing phone number a few times.
I do a lot of Google Maps moderation and there’s a ton of bad changes being attempted every day. Honestly I’m amazed Google doesn’t bother to vet anyone really. Becoming a local guide is easy and not that difficult for a spam group to create enough fake accounts to get things pushed through. Just last night I caught the local Target that was reclassified as a “prison”. What Google needs to do is lock information for…
Why do you work for Google for no pay? OpenStreetMap always needs work. Help the community.
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Google already let's people claim their maps listing via Google My Business. I would be shocked if they couldn't lock edits, or at the very least review them. I hope Google uses their Duplex tech to review phone number changes though, should be easy to call the existing phone number a few times.
Claiming your listing does not let you lock it in the sense you are thinking of. It's also not very difficult to claim a listing that was already claimed by somebody else -- they will get an email asking them to challenge your claim, and if they don't respond you can take over the listing. That's how it worked a year ago, which is the last time I used it. You can review edits in Google My Business. But Google will so…
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Honestly for me it boils down to Google maps being just a superior app. It's not even the amount of data in itself(which is a lot already tbh) but just the app being better. I don't think I have seen a decent OSM app yet.
OsmAnd is far superior to Google Maps in my opinion, especially for backcountry offline navigation. It's one of the most important apps when traveling abroad or when cell service is spotty. Google Maps is basically useless in rural South America, for example... and OSM is actually more up to date than Google Maps when it comes to river crossings, etc... and POI data is available for offline use. Google Maps can't eve…
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I've tried to report this map spam before - details at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/04/hundreds-of-thousands-of-sp... Happy to be contacted if you'd like more information.
Your blog post appears to be conflating Google Maps with MyMaps. MyMaps lets people create & publish their own maps with random POIs: for example, here's a map of nice wineries around Melbourne. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mtgpe7JU9OtHUUdvG_A6Uq0eTp... However, these do not show up in the "main" Google Maps, and adding spam to them isn't any more effective than adding spam to a random website. Disclaimer: I use…
I don't remember how I found those specific ones, but using Google Maps for Android finds some pretty similar entries. Perhaps you could pass that on to your old team?
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Why do you work for Google for no pay? OpenStreetMap always needs work. Help the community.
How can I contribute to OpenStreetMap? (currently spending a few 5-15 minutes chunks of time on Google Maps)
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Why do you work for Google for no pay? OpenStreetMap always needs work. Help the community.
It's not quite "pay", but Google have a notion of "points" to reward contributors, who they call local guides: https://support.google.com/local-guides/answer/6225851?hl=en Anecdotally it's mostly credits towards Google's own products, free storage, etc, but also freebies like subscriptions to the NYTimes Crossword, etc -- at least at the lower levels.
I got burned by a similar scam with information changes in google. I was looking for a specific restaurant in google and used the given address to get there. When I got there I found out it was a different restaurant. I asked about the other restaurant and they told me the other restaurant had gone out of business. A complete lie. I'm sure they hired a company to promote them and they used this trick to increase thei…
>A complete lie. How do you know it's a lie?