What, no Street View? Why?
Google Mars (2005)
71–80 of 87 posts
Re: Google Mars (2005)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only in the initial cities in which they started doing it before the backlash got so large that they abandoned it. A few months later, when Microsoft or whoever did their take on it, nobody cared anymore because it wasn't about principles.
It was more of a media campaign, ad brokers trying to kneecap that other ad broker. Microsoft wasn't in the ad business back in the day, so no threat to media businesses.
Street view for Google Mars. I think the atmosphere is too thin for those photo-taking cars to run very far. That and the lack of any streets on Mars.
At least in the unclassified imagery that has been made public... (cue eerie music)
Re: Google Mars (2005)
#73Noel and Michael launched mars and moon in about three weeks after starting as 'interns' under me, as that was the fastest path to a badge. They're both still at Google, I think. (As employees!) Someday I'll write up the story, but that was a heck of a fun project!
> (As employees!)
Cracked me up
Re: Google Mars (2005)
#74weird that there's no map scale provided - like a "___ = 1km" legend thingy
also the silver/gold infrared map reminds me of Brinstar in the original Metroid.
Re: Google Mars (2005)
#75Check this newer version: https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@17.5325978,179.82741...
They also have many other planets and celestial bodies here.
Re: Google Mars (2005)
#76If Google still had a sense of humor they would do Google Flat Earth for April Fool’s Day one of these years. Complete with perimeter ice wall and an announcement that scientists have made an amazing discovery about the true shape of the Earth. Easter egg of infinite turtle stack supporting the Earth Plane if you do 3D view and flip it over. Alas…
Re: Google Mars (2005)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comments from 15 years ago are even more interesting.
What's that quote about dying a hero vs living long enough to see yourself become the villain?
Sometimes you chicken out, and someone else does it ...
To wit: around the same time, Google tossed out some service that would listen to your computer's mic for room sounds (such as a TV broadcast), and provide helpful info.
I guess people were creeped out, thing was shut down, and now we have Amazon's version ...
Re: Google Mars (2005)
#78Hahaha, that was a busy weekend when this launched in like 2005-2006. I was one of the sysadmins of the website with the THEMIS images. Google promoted it directly below the search box. Which made my web servers 3 clicks away from Google’s front page. I spent the weekend cannibalizing compute nodes from one of our clusters to work as caching proxies. It all worked out pretty well.
Very cool, thanks for sharing. It's fascinating to me that google has put so little effort into their planetary maps since an inital burst of interest, but hasn't killed them yet. Is it just "below the radar"? I guess I assumed they would have some management process that kills zombie projects... don't they?
Since this is built on top of google maps, I suspect the only marginal cost of keeping it is keeping the 10s of MB of (MAYBE 100s MB) of data around. The cost of the labor to delete it is probably more than another 100 years of serving it.
There’s no real money in the planetary data. All of my colleagues who worked on that have gone on to Google and to work on Google Maps or Google Earth Engine, which do generate revenue. This project ended up ultimately being a recruitment effort on Google’s part.
Re: Google Mars (2005)
#79Noel and Michael launched mars and moon in about three weeks after starting as 'interns' under me, as that was the fastest path to a badge. They're both still at Google, I think. (As employees!) Someday I'll write up the story, but that was a heck of a fun project!
Lol, Noel as an intern.
Re: Google Mars (2005)
#80Search located Pathfinder without problems[0]. But not the Ares III landing site[1]... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)
The site was launched about 5 years before the book was written.