When Google introduced its live traffic feature on Google Maps in India earlier this month, it indicated that the usage of Android mobile phones in the country?s biggest cities was good enough to determine traffic flow on busy roads. To boot, these traffic updates were also available on the GPS guided, turn-by-turn navigation feature which it launched simultaneously for Android phones.
Even as the internet company expands its range of features on Google Maps, the software product that is core to building maps is now reaching deeper into rural India, aided by a growing community of mapping enthusiasts. The Indian volunteer network of Google Map Maker, the product designed in India to help build maps by crowdsourcing information from users, is among the biggest globally.
?Over the years, people have improved the city maps dramatically. What has happened beyond that is the mapping wave initiated in the cities has spread like wildfire into the smaller towns, initially the tier-two and tier-three cities, and the more recent phenomena which we call the rural wave,? says Lalitesh Katragadda, country head?India Product at Google and inventor of Google Map Maker, which was launched in India in September 2008. ?There are communities of volunteers who are self organised and who are moving about and mapping rural India. I think within the decade we will see almost every village in India and every town reasonably well mapped.?
To be sure, there are now more rural locations on Google India?s map with more enthusiasts mapping key landmarks or services such as roads and hospitals, says Beemidi Kiran, a designated Google Map Maker advocate who reviews entries by other volunteers and participates in Google?s regional community fora.
?In the past year, the pace of adding villages to the maps has increased substantially. Even 2-3 years ago, there was no data on villages in Google India,? says Kiran who is based in Hyderabad and spends at least 5 hours a day updating maps. ?Earlier, people were not interested in mapping these areas and only marked farmhouses and so on. Now, they have started to realise the benefits of marking important locations.?
?From a mapping perspective in particular, India is actually like the crown jewel of Google?s user mapping community. And, people have just gone to incredible lengths to fill in details on maps,? Darren Baker, product manager for Google Maps said earlier this month at the launch of the live traffic and navigation features. ?India is undoubtedly a very important market for us, particularly when it comes to mapping services.?
The live traffic feature highlights real-time traffic flow on the maps of six Indian cities while Google Maps Navigation offers a voice-guided navigation system that will offer driving directions to smartphones running on the Android operating system.
In cities, the mapping services have been useful in numerous ways such as helping ambulance drivers navigate through localities in emergency situations, says Katragadda. ?What?s so interesting about rural mapping is it starts solving problems which we did not realise could be solved.?
Mapping is key to Google?s aim of making search more local. The company estimates that at least 10%-20% of what people search for on the internet is local information and reckons that the number could potentially grow to at least 40% if it could offer all the information people sought. ?We can tell from our logs before we launched our first maps on Map Maker, that we were not answering these questions at all. We have reached a point where we are now able to answer a good portion of their questions,? says Katragadda. ?We are still several years away from answering every possible local question that a person cares about. Without the maps to anchor the information, it would not be organisable or searchable.
To be sure, the maps are also central to the effort in building new products for emerging markets, an area that Katragadda?s team in India has been focusing on in recent months. Google organises information based on the links to websites and pages and their relative importance but the Web graphs can be weak in many of the emerging markets.
?In the absence of strong Web links and Web graphs, you have to then look out for other sources of signals which will tell you the relevance and importance of pieces of information to users,? says Katragadda. ?In those situations, local signals tend to be highly relevant. And, to organise information on the hyperlocal web, you really need the map. So the map becomes in may ways central in the future to bring people onto the internet which is the mission of emerging markets.?