Google developed technologies like BigTable for a reason, you know!
You can serve data straight out of a database like BigTable as long as it's done carefully (to keep latency low). And the dataset can be easily replicated around the world in different datacenters to reduce round trip times.
I used to work on Google Earth. It's a really cool project. The serving infrastructure is pretty simple though. It's basically just a simple frontend server in front of BigTables (or was). The real magic happens in the data processing pipeline that produces the datasets, and in the client side rendering code. It's not like web search where the serving infrastructure is hugely complex and very much secret sauce.
The thing that impresses me the most in recent times about Earth is how the Maps team were able to write an Earth client in Javascript that starts way faster than the desktop client does. The traditional client is a large C++ app that has always struggled with startup time, I think due to a combination of code size and having lots of static constructors that slow down the critical path. And the bulk of the app was written when Keyhole was an independent company selling into government and industry, so startup time didn't matter much.
Also, the image processing pipeline is really amazing, because it blends together lots of disparate imagery sets from many different providers and cameras, with different lighting and colour calibrations, whilst still producing something usable. In the early days of Earth you could easily see the seams where different types of images had been stitched together. And if you zoomed you could clearly see the thin strips from the satellite passes. These days you still can see them if you look around, but there is a lot of very clever colour balancing and reblending being done to make the whole thing a lot more seamless and beautiful.
EDIT: Really? Already at -2 after 15 minutes? This is directly on-topic (it directly criticizes the quality of the process that was praised before), it is directly relevant (it provides examples for a counterargument), it is not a personal attack or anything, and it provides sources.
Before you downvote, please comment – that’s a lot more helpful to discussion
________________________
> In the early days of Earth you could easily see the seams where different types of images had been stitched together. And if you zoomed you could clearly see the thin strips from the satellite passes. These days you still can see them if you look around, but there is a lot of very clever colour balancing and reblending being done to make the whole thing a lot more seamless and beautiful.
Wherever I look around my home town, it’s blurry, stitched together, with bad color balancing.
Try taking a look at the areas where it touches the open sea, it’s even worse.
In addition to the imagery taking half an hour to load even anything that’s not totally blurry (which can’t be my connection as all competitors are instant), and the missing 3D in a city of 300k, the imagery is (a) not updated since 2005, (b) has constant edges and stripes everywhere, (c) is – due to not being updated – missing several districts already.
I’ve complained about this on several occasions before to Google employees who promised to fix it, for example here [1].
I have to be honest, I’m more than disappointed with Google Maps and Earth.
Even here maps imagery (linked below in comparison) is more up to date, has higher resolution, and is blended a lot better.
Google, as always, seems to only (or mostly) care about the US. There, even most small towns have perfectly clear 3D imagery from the current year.
It’s just another punch in the face in a long row of "US-only!". The Internet. Connecting the ~~world~~ US.
Your tone is critical, aggressive, and makes no attempt to do anything other than express your personal experience. I believe this is why you receive downvotes -- your comment only serves to further your personal agenda and does not add to the conversation.
> Your tone is critical, aggressive, and makes no attempt to do anything other than express your personal experience.
(a) it’s not just my experience – it’s an issue that affects many people – most places outside of the US or large population centers look like this
(b) after complaining with hundreds of other people, some of whom have complained for a literal decade trying to improve the situation, could you be calm?
Especially when people then say "look how awesome this is", and you yourself know how bad it really is?
You can serve data straight out of a database like BigTable as long as it's done carefully (to keep latency low). And the dataset can be easily replicated around the world in different datacenters to reduce round trip times.
I used to work on Google Earth. It's a really cool project. The serving infrastructure is pretty simple though. It's basically just a simple frontend server in front of BigTables (or was). The real magic happens in the data processing pipeline that produces the datasets, and in the client side rendering code. It's not like web search where the serving infrastructure is hugely complex and very much secret sauce.
The thing that impresses me the most in recent times about Earth is how the Maps team were able to write an Earth client in Javascript that starts way faster than the desktop client does. The traditional client is a large C++ app that has always struggled with startup time, I think due to a combination of code size and having lots of static constructors that slow down the critical path. And the bulk of the app was written when Keyhole was an independent company selling into government and industry, so startup time didn't matter much.
Also, the image processing pipeline is really amazing, because it blends together lots of disparate imagery sets from many different providers and cameras, with different lighting and colour calibrations, whilst still producing something usable. In the early days of Earth you could easily see the seams where different types of images had been stitched together. And if you zoomed you could clearly see the thin strips from the satellite passes. These days you still can see them if you look around, but there is a lot of very clever colour balancing and reblending being done to make the whole thing a lot more seamless and beautiful.