14 DAY TRIAL // Organizing the world's information, Google's long-time company mantra, can be an arduous task and sometimes even the most advanced computer systems aren't enough. This is when Google falls back to the oldest computing resource known, actual people. The company recently started creating dedicated pages for, in theory, every place on Earth. This has great business opportunities for Google and could prove very useful to the actual users.
The problem is that there is just too much information to be filled in and errors occasionally creep in. It's hard for Google to know, but people living nearby will notice if a small shop isn't placed where it is supposed on Google Maps or if the details on the Place Page are wrong or outdated. However, what Google is doing is provide the people with easy-to-use tools to correct those errors, the most recent one being the ability to edit a place's position aided by Street View imagery, which can be a lot more useful than the top-down view provided by the standard map or the satellite imagery.
"Click on the 'edit' link, and then click the 'Move marker' link in the updated infowindow. You'll see two jumping markers in the map and the Street View image appear, which means both of them can be dragged. When you drag the marker on the map to a new position, the marker inside the panorama will be updated correspondingly, and vice versa," Jie Shao, software engineer at Google, explains.
"Since you can now view a street-level image of where the marker will be placed, it's not difficult to find the exact spot in the image and place the marker to the right position," he adds. The new feature comes after just last week Google also introduced a new way of editing the details of a place by making them all available and editable in a single page.