14 DAY TRIAL // Although Google is a company with professional and high-quality products, it seems like the search giant tends to be based more and more on the content provided by the its users. Take the example of YouTube, the video service acquired by Google in October 2006 that recorded an impressive number of visitors looking for homemade videos. It's obvious the content is more attractive, although some of the user generated clips are looking as the professional ones created with high-tech equipment. This year in January, Google released a major update for Google Earth that allows users to create their own images for the application. As you know, Google Earth is a downloadable application that allows users to view maps and other satellite imagery directly from your desktop. Along with the major update for Google Earth, the company also released the compatibility with Google Sketchup, a downloadable tool that enables users to create 3D drawings from cities, buildings and streets.
Since the interoperability was announced, numerous users created 3D drawings of their local map and uploaded it on the Google Warehouse, a website powered by the search giant especially to host all these files sent by the users.
Search Engine Land reported today that Google is preparing to invite the users that uploaded the best drawings to Googleplex and allow them to work with the company's experts. "A few individuals or teams whose works are judged to be the best will be flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View for a special workshop with 3D modelling experts in the company and tour of the Googleplex campus. All submissions belong to Google of course, making it yet another innovative approach to exploiting the power of user-generated content to build out features through relatively simple/cheap incentives," the publication said.
In the past, Google took a similar decision when they allowed users to contribute to the improvement of Image Search technology through the Image Labeler program. This tool connects two users and displays the same picture to both of them, requiring them to enter a name and a description of the photo. This way, the technology will name the images with more relevant words, improving the search results.