"Don't be evil"

[miriam_e]

That is the slogan used by Google.
Are they living up to it? We all remember how they bowed immediately to censorship in China. That was a big disappointment.
Now Georgia has disappeared* from GoogleMaps.

[*I've since been told Georgia was never on GoogleMaps, but this is no less puzzling than a recent disappearance would be. Maps of that region have been available for decades. What possible reason would there be for omitting such a world trouble-spot?]

http://twxr.us/1a5

or see on GoogleMaps itself:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=&ie=UTF8&ll=41.926803,44.648438&spn=4.119432,7.349854&z=7

Bummer.

Additional: There is a very nice 2,529 x 1,872 map on Wikipedia at
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Georgia_high_detail_map.png
in the article there on Georgia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(country)

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

But I find this extremely surprising. Why would they not have maps of Georgia? It seems to me that it would not be terribly difficult to obtain maps of Georgia. I have old world atlases on paper that have roads and cities mapped inside Georgia, Armenia, etc.

You point up an interesting problem of the internet: exactly how would one check whether something used to be on the internet. Please note that I'm not disagreeing with you. I would have loved to check whether the images had recently evaporated, but the ephemeral nature of the net makes this pretty-much impossible.

I have in the past managed to use the Internet Archive Project to dredge up data that the Australian government deleted from their sites (in particular a study into relative costs of different forms of energy) when their (corrupt) aims didn't fit reality. So sometimes you can verify that something has been removed from the net. But GoogleMaps blocks the InternetArchive bots (I've checked) so no history is visible. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to block archiving bots, bandwidth limitations being the main one.

And that brings up yet another question: how responsible is it of our civilisation to rely on ephemeral information sources that can be so easily controlled and manipulated? For instance I love the Wikipedia project, but it all lives on centralised servers. That is very unsafe.

[johnnybrainwash.livejournal.com]

My best guess, and I don't really know, is that there are no current maps that are reliable enough to meet Google's standards. Georgia may have had more pressing concerns since the Soviet collapse than updating their maps, and Google probably wants to ensure a certain level of quality.

A lot of less-developed countries have only major highways marked (try Afghanistan and Zimbabwe), and I'm pretty sure I've seen other countries with nothing at all.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

The cities haven't changed their names or locations in decades, but they aren't marked. If you search for them GoogleMaps proves it actually has their positions in its database, because it will find them (Search for Sukhumi for instance). So it can't be ascribed to lack of precision. The lack of names on the map is weird. I can't imagine an honest reason for it.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia has a fairly detailed (2,529 x 1,872 pixel) map at
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Georgia_high_detail_map.png
in their article on Georgia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(country))