Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
BrianMcClendonisatall,soft-spokenmaninhismidforties,withadeeplycreasedbrow
that always makes him look a little more concerned than he actually is. Maybe it's a sign
of the unusual burden he carries as Google Earth's head engineer. After all, I've never
met anyone in charge of his own planet before. You may scoff that Google Earth isn't a
real
planet, but consider: its architecture contains
hundreds of terabytes
of data. (A tera-
byte is equivalent to one thousand gigabytes; the entire text of every topic in the Library
of Congress could be stored in just
twenty terabytes or so
.) It's a mammoth responsibility,
surely more complex than being the person in charge of, say, some uninhabitable iceball
like Uranus or Neptune. But rank does have its privileges: the center of Google Earth (that
is, the exact center of the map when the application opens) is an apparently random apart-
ment building in Lawrence, Kansas—a secret salute to McClendon, who grew up in that
very building.
Overseeing his digital dominion certainly isn't getting any easier. The library of aerial
photographs that coats Google Earth—taken from satellites, planes, hot-air balloons, even
camera-equipped kites—is growing exponentially. “All the pictures that have ever been
goal is centimeter-per-pixel imagery for the entire globe: every square centimeter of the
(real) Earth's surface would be its own pixel on Google Earth, not unlike Lewis Carroll's
imaginary map. That goal is still more than twenty years away, McClendon guesses, since
there are still places on Google Earth where the resolution is fifteen meters per pixel, more
than a thousand times chunkier. And even once all three dimensions are sorted out, engin-
eers must still grapple with the fourth dimension: time. Google Earth has assembled a lib-
rary of historical photographs, so you can watch the years advance from orbit, but there's
the future to worryabout as well—the Sisyphean task ofkeeping the map upto date. Users
can already watch real-time features like weather and traffic cross the surface of Google
Earth,but,saysMcClendon,“Themuchhardertruthishumantruth.Doesthisbusinessstill
exist? Isthat aphonenumber? Isthelocation ofthedoorwayhere? These arethequestions
we have to get right if you're going to run the Google Maps navigation in your phone and
get to the right business, which is effectively what pays the bills.”
Google's mapping arm is a big moneymaker for the Internet giant; McClendon points
out that 90 percent of all retail spending still happens offline, and that's powered by geo-
graphic technology like mapping and local search. But Google Maps and Earth have also
become a lightning rod for geopolitical controversy. China might crack down because of
Google“mistakes”likenotlabelingTaiwanasoneofitsprovinces,orNicaraguamightuse
a misdrawn border in Google Maps as a rationale for
a military incursion
into Costa Rican
territory.SometimesGooglewillbuythird-partyimagesthathavefabricatedorblurredcer-
tain sensitive areas. Most famously, after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney's residence at
the U.S. Naval Observatory stayed stubbornly fuzzy long after Google had found alternate
