14 DAY TRIAL // Google Maps has grown considerably since it was first introduced and has become one of the search giant's most important and well-known products. The list of features and information that has been added is practically endless – if you happen to live in some of the more developed parts of the world that is. If not, you're lucky if you get a few major international roads. But that is about to change as Google has just released its Map Maker project, which lets individual users edit the map information, in several new countries in Eastern Europe as well as in Mexico.
“Mexico joins an impressive list of Latin American countries spanning much of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. Combined with the launch in Eastern Europe earlier this week, this launch constitutes a substantial expansion in the western hemisphere, wherein these two launches have doubled the number of users who can map their country on Map Maker,” Lior Ron, product lead, and Lalitesh Katragadda, tech lead, write on Google's Lat Long blog.
Map Maker is a wiki-style project available for certain parts of the world, enabling users to contribute and edit mapping information. They can draw lacking features, label existing ones and even add specific buildings or natural elements like lakes and rivers. In just one year the project has proved very successful, radically improving the quality of the maps in the regions where it was launched.
Now Google has expanded the project, adding several countries in Eastern Europe earlier this week and now Mexico as well to bring the total number of editable countries to 170. The new countries in Europe that can now be edited are Albania, Belarus, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia.
Numerous communities around the world have embraced the new tools once they were launched for their countries and have provided the regions with detailed mapping information. Others have also been vocal about wanting better map data for their regions with Google noting the Romanian Facebook community in particular, which now numbers more than 8,500 users petitioning for better support. Map Maker will now allow those with knowledge of the local area to enhance the maps without the need to pay expert cartographers for the data.